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STUDIES IN HEGEL'S 



PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 



WITH A CHAPTER ON 
CHRISTIAN UNITY IN AMERICA 



J. MACBRIDE STERRETT, D. D. 

PROFESSOR OF ETHICS AND APOLOGETICS IN THE SEABURY DIVINITY SCHOOL 




NEW YORK 

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 

1890 



lot co*o»»»*| 



W* 






Copyright, 1890, 
By D. APPLETON AND COMPANY. 



TO MY SONS 

THAT THEY HAVE REASONABLE, HOLY, AND VITAL FAITH 

AND TO MY DAUGHTER IN PARADISE. 



PREFACE. 



The insisting upon knowing what there is in it, 
even in religion, is one of the profoundest impulses 
of the human spirit. Hegel tried to satisfy this de- 
mand in his Philosophie der Religion. He endeav- 
ored to discover and state the speculative idea of 
religion. But with him the speculative was both 
vital and practical — the very life of the spirit throb- 
bing through all the tangled mass of variegated 
religious phenomena in the world's history. 

Dr. W. T. Harris, the profoundest student of 
Hegel in this country, says that " no other work 
more deserves translation into English." But any 
mere translation of it would need a further trans- 
lation into expository paraphrase. The inadequacy 
of such a translation may be tested by the reader 
in the first few pages of Chapter VIII. 

I therefore offer some STUDIES on parts of this 
great work, deeming them of value, both in them- 
selves, and in introducing readers to Hegel's own 
volumes. 



vi Philosophy of Religion. 

The title studies is a most elastic one, bearing 
on its face its own apology for not being finished 
literary work. It signifies studying done " out loud," 
after considerable silent pondering over the " what 
there is in it." It also allows greatest freedom for 
new inferences and applications suggested by the 
text. Hence this volume is not a mere expository 
paraphrase of Hegel. I have adhered to the ex- 
pository form only in Chapters III and VIII. I have 
also followed Hegel's order of argument in Chapter 
IV, while freely making it the basis of studies in 
Apologetics. The purpose of the volume through- 
out is apologetic. It is written with faith and in the 
interests of " The Faith" though demanding an almost 
antipodal orientation or point of view to that of both 
deistic orthodoxy and ecclesiasticism. Some may 
blame the author for needlessly abandoning some of 
the current methods of apologetics. But thorough 
and honost proof of their faultiness and inadequacy 
has first been made. It is mere time-serving to 
manufacture evidences where there are none. It is 
as useless as it is wrong to attempt the " hard-Church " 
method of overriding reason and conscience with the 
mere might of an uncriticised authority. It is both 
anti-theistic and anti-Christian to profane the sec- 
ular in the interest of the sacred. It is infidel to 
refuse to welcome the Light lightening every man 
and every institution that comes into the world. To 
posit an abstract Infinite, a merely supermundane 



Preface. vii 

God, lands us inevitably in agnosticism. To prove 
the brightness of Christianity by portraying the 
darkness of heathenism leads to pessimism. 

On the other hand, to discover the concrete In- 
finite immanent in, vitalizing and educating man 
throughout his history ; to maintain the essential 
kinship of man with God ; to insist upon religion 
being the mutual reconciliation and communion of 
God and" man, makes the whole earth kin, and binds 
it with chains of gold to the head and heart as well as 
to the feet of God. This is the key and motive to 
the vital rationality of religion, interpreting and 
vindicating at their relative worth the many ele- 
ments which, when put forth separately, are easily 
overthrown by skepticism. To acknowledge that 
these elements have only relative validity is the first 
step toward integrating them as living members in 
a historical manifestation of the supreme A670? " rec- 
onciling the world unto himself." God's revela- 
tion to man, and man's discovery of God, are but the 
two sides of the same divine education of the race. 
Neither of these sides is ever complete and final ; 
neither of them ever lacks progressively adequate 
activity. 

In the light of the immanence of God in the 
religious history of mankind, old evidences, seem 
curiously inconclusive and unnecessary. Place has 
not been found in this volume for the work of re- 
setting the old faith in the light of this fundamental 



viii Philosophy of Religion. 

truth. But the way for this has been radically pre- 
pared. The deistic separation of God and man, or 
the setting them merely side by side, with only 
occasional and mechanically supernatural connection, 
has been strongly contended against, while the op- 
posite error of a pantheistic confusing of the two 
has been avoided as both unspiritual and unphilo- 
sophical. That is, both a mechanical naturalism and 
a mechanical supernaturalism are abrogated and ful- 
filled in the concrete view of the Divine immanence. 
Otherwise the one of these two views is just as 
atheistic as the other. 

The use and the abuse of the language of meta- 
phor in religion have been fully considered. The 
relative rationality of passing interpretations and 
forms of religion is granted without yielding the 
claim of finality to any one of them. In every way 
religion, in the high and broad sense of vital kinship 
between God and man, has been vindicated as ra- 
tional and necessary. 

I have studied over nearly the same part of 
Hegel's work that Principal Caird has in his Philoso- 
phy of Religion. That is a masterpiece of rare art 
in translating Hegel out of the narrow, arid husk of 
scholastic form and prolix technicalities. I gladly 
recognize his volume as one far beyond my own 
ability to produce. It is the work of a consummate 
literary artist, and a powerful preacher and thinker. 
I rejoice to see its large and increasing circulation in 



Preface, ix 

this country. I am indebted to it for leading me to 
a study of the original. Hegel's own work is heavy, 
formal, scholastic, and removed from ordinary, un- 
scientific conceptions of the revealed mystery of the 
relations of God and man. But it contains the philo- 
sophical key to the heart of the matter. His whole 
work is to reconcile reason with religion, by finding 
reason in religion and religion in reason. It expli- 
cates, in the form of thought, the -content of religion, 
which is ordinarily held in the form of feeling or 
metaphor, or at best in the form of faith, or abbrevi- 
ated knowledge. 

The last chapter, on Christian Unity, is obviously 
an appendix, written in view of current abstract con- 
ceptions of the Church, which hinder the realiza- 
tion of its visible organic unity. It is an attempt to 
annul this abstract conception in the more concrete 
historical view. It is a study that makes for truth, 
for faith, and for unity. 

I have to thank my colleague, Prof. Charles L. 
Wells, for his assistance in the tabulation of the 
facts in regard to the early Christian ministry, in 
this appendix. 

J. Macbride Sterrett. 

Faribault, September i, i88g. 



CONTENTS, 



CHAPTER I. 

PAGE 

Hegelianism— A Prefatory Study i 

The different schools of Hegelianism. Hegelianism and Chris- 
tianity. English and American Hegelians. Prof. Flint's criti- 
cism answered. 

CHAPTER II. 
Introductory . 



Growth of the philosophy of religion. Clement of Alex- 
andria, Lessing, Kant. Key-words. 



25 



CHAPTER III. 
Hegel's Introduction to his Philosophy of Religion 38 

Hegel's sublime conception of religion. Divorce between 
religion and the secular life. Philosophy the interpreter of re- 
ligion. Has it a competent organ for this work in reason? 
Hegel's classification of the whole subject. 

CHAPTER IV. 

The Vital Idea of Religion 61 

Hegel's encyclopaedia of the philosophical sciences. The re- 
ligious relation. Necessity of the religious stand-point. Forms 
of the religious consciousness — feeling, sensuous perception 
(art), and metaphorical thought. Rationalistic apologetics. Use 
and abuse of metaphor in religion. Can religion be taught? 
Causes of present skepticism. Dreams of infallibility. Clerical- 



xii Philosophy of Religion. 

PAGE 

ism. Philosophy and science. Relativism and Agnosticism. 
Mediation of religious knowledge. Christian education. Proofs 
of the existence of God. The false and the true finite. Posi- 
tivism. The false and the true infinite. The speculative idea 
of religion. Cultus. 

CHAPTER V. 
Theology, Anthropology, and Pantheism . . .159 

What have we here ? We have — 1. The highest form of the- 
ology. The Divine personality. The English Hegelians and 
personality. 2'. An adequate first principle. Personality vs. 
individuality. T. H. Green's metaphysics of ethics. Organic 
unity in all knowing and being. 3. We have not pantheism. 
Immortality. Thinking is worshiping. 

CHAPTER VI. 
The Method of Comparative Religion . . .212 

The rise and progress of this science. The eighteenth-cent- 
ury Christian view. The skeptical view. The modern Chris- 
tian scientific view. Definition of religion. Objections to the 
modern view. The organic connection of Christianity with pre- 
ceding religions. 

CHAPTER VII. 

Classification of the Positive (pre-Christian) Re- 
ligions .... 233 

Finality and empirical origins. True and false methods. 
Evolution according to Hegel and Spencer. Sympathetic study 
of other religions. The modern historico-scientific classifica- 
tion of religions. Hegel's philosophico-scientific classification. 
Christianity the absolute religion, and its relation to other re- 
ligions. Puritanical interpretation of Christian history. 

CHAPTER VIII. 
The Absolute Religion . . . . . . . 268 

Translation of Hegel on Christianity as the absolute re- 
ligion. Miracles. Biblical theology. Kant's refutation of the 



Contents. xiii 

PAGE 

ontological argument stated and criticised. The Trinity. Crea- 
tion. The incarnation. The Church. Dogma and sacraments. 
The work of philosophy in formulating and vindicating " the 
Faith." The Reformation. Eighteenth-century rationalism. 
The aim of philosophy. Only reason can heal the wounds 
made by rationalism. 

APPENDIX. 

Christian Unity in America and the Historic Epis- 
copate 309 

The declaration of the House of Bishops. Hegel on religion •* 
and the State. The historical method applied to the interpre- 
tation of the historic Episcopate. Hooker's view of Episcopacy. 
Two interpretations to-day — the governmental and the sacer- 
dotal. Broad Churchmen and Anglo-Catholics. The facts in 
the case. Archbishop Whately and Archdeacon Farrar on 
Episcopacy. Bishop Whipple on Christian unity. Work and 
worth of the various Churches in America. Practical sugges- 
tions. 



STUDIES IN HEGEL'S 
PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 



CHAPTER I. 

HEGELIANISM — A PREFATORY STUDY. 

Hegel wrote his own' actual posthumous biog- 
raphy when he said, "The condemnation which a 
great man lays upon the world is to force it to ex- 
plain him." Scarcely had the grave closed over the 
chief intellectual victim of the cholera in 183 1, when 
this sentence issued in the most wholesale accepta- 
tion, rejection, misrepresentation, criticism, vitupera- 
tion, and sectarian and heretical interpretations of 
the Hegelian philosophy. He has been the best 
abused philosopher of modern times. / He evidently 
apprehended this treatment, as he is also reported to 
have said of his disciples, "There is only one man 
living who understands me, and he does not!* Cer- 
tainly his reply to the smart Frenchman was very 
apt. He asked Hegel if he could not gather up and 
express his philosophy in one sentence for him. 
" No," he replied, " at least not in French," No one 
who has studied his Logic, at least, could wish it 
to be more brief. It is one of those books " which 
would be much shorter if it were not so short." The 



2 Philosophy of Religion. 

real value of all great works is not to be measured 
by the immediate assent they command, like com- 
monplace solutions of great questions by ordinary 
men, but by the amount of study and discussion and 
explanation they demand in order to gain the wide 
sweep of view and depth of solution which they con- 
tain. 

Hegel died master in the field of philosophy. 
He had conquered and founded an empire. His phi- 
losophy had pervaded universities, state, and church. 
His disciples were numerous, admiring, ardent. For 
ten years after his death his system remained the. 
foremost intellectual phenomenon of the time. In 
the mean while, however, interpretation was suc- 
ceeding faith and dismembering the parts of the or- 
ganic whole of the master. Interpreters of his sys- 
tem have differed more than those of the Bible. 
From it, each — the right wing, the center, the left, 
and the extreme left wings — his dogma sought and 
each his dogma found. The comprehensive system 
offered various aspects, which seemed to various 
types of mind to be the whole system. The right 
wing, Goeschel, Gabler, Daub, and Erdmann, found 
him to be the champion of Christianity and of all 
social institutions, while the extreme left divested the 
whole system of all religious and ethical meaning, 
degenerating into the boldest materialism and athe- 
ism. Of this school Feuerbach is best known to us 
through the early translation of George Eliot. The- 
ology was merely anthropology. Dr. Strauss is the 
best-known representative of the left wing, through 
his mythical theory of the Life of Christ. While 
the right wing could plainly show that Hegel had 
vindicated God as the subject of all philosophy, and 



Hegelianism — A Prefatory Study. 3 

Christianity as the absolute and perfect religion 
whose influence was gradually actualizing moral 
order in humanity, the left wings claimed that logi- 
cally the method made " each man his own God " 
(autolatry), with "a right to everything" here, as 
there was no hereafter. They rejected Hegel's ac- 
knowledged theistic and Christian position. But to 
trace these various orthodox and heretical schools 
of Hegelianism would be almost to write a history 
of modern German philosophy. 

This breaking up into such opposite schools 
caused skepticism as to its real worth. This, how- 
ever, has been the fortune of every great truth or 
system which has ever influenced the human race. 
The complete Socratist came only after numerous 
partial and antagonistic interpreters of Socrates. 
Hegelianism, indeed, is said by some to be now dead 
in Germany. The many diverse interpretations of 
it have been appealed to as a disproof of its validity. 
Within twenty-five years it has almost ceased to ex- 
ist in Germany as a professed system, while in very 
truth both its spirit and method are the leaven at 
work in all the present philosophic thought. 

In a Philosophical Verein, at Leipsic, an expres- 
sion of surprise at the studied ignoring of Hegel 
only called forth a flood of bitter but irrational de- 
nunciation. Only with the greatest difficulty could 
one find a full set of his works in that book market 
of the Continent. As a professed system it does not 
reign in Germany. But it died only as the seed 
which grows. The day of mere discipleship is past. 
But philosophy owns no Pope. Names stand only 
for insights of human thought. Plato, Aristotle, 
Leibnitz, and Kant, have often been " outgrown," 



4 Philosophy of Religion. . 

and yet they remain facile principes, or, as Dante de- 
scribes Aristotle, "the masters of those who know" 
(i maestri di color che sannd). 

Hegel's own " method " has been applied to his 
system. At first blank being, mere all or nothing or 
nonsense, becoming, through all sorts of differentiat- 
ing interpretations, something, many things determi- 
nate, only to be again discussed into fragments, still 
squirming with the life of the logical idea into other 
and higher representations, till now the transformed 
Hegel really occupies the intellectual throne as firmly 
as his bust the pedestal in the Hegelplatz in Berlin. 
This process of the interpretation of a system Hegel 
himself thus outlines : 

A party first truly shows itself to have won the victory 
when it breaks up into two parties ; for so it proves that it con- 
tains in itself the principle with which it first had to conflict, 
and thus that it has got beyond the one-sidedness which was 
incidental to its earliest expression. The interest which for- 
merly divided itself between it and that to which it was opj- 
posed now falls entirely within itself, and the opposing prin- 
ciple is left behind and forgotten, just because it is represented 
by one of the sides in the new controversy which now occu- 
pies the minds of men. At the same time it is to be observed 
that when the old principle thus reappears, it is no longer 
what it was before ; for it is changed and purified by the 
higher element into which it is now taken up. In this point 
of view that which appears at first to be a lamentable breach 
and dissolution of the unity of a party is really the crowning 
proof of success. 

He has been a name to swear at as well as to 
" swear by." He has not been canonized, yet he is 
master even of those who know him not. In all that 



Hegelianism — A Prefatory Study. 5 

relates to philosophy, religion, and history, Hege- 
lianism is the greatest power in Germany to-day. 

Von Hartmann and Wundt may be the conspicu- 
ous stars in the present philosophic horizon, but they 
shine over only a very small part of the planet that 
Hegel illuminates. Von Hartmann himself has said : 
" The fewest of those who are influenced by Hegel's 
spirit are themselves aware of it ; it has become the 
common heritage of the most cultured circles of the Ger- 
man people.'* 

In Germany, then, there are but a very few of the 
old-fashioned followers, disciples, and expounders of 
Hegelianism as a system, but its spirit and method 
have become inextricably entangled with the whole 
thought and culture of the country. It has had dis- 
ciples and expounders in Italy, France, and Russia. 
In Great Britain it has also greatly influenced philo- 
sophic thought, though accepted and expounded as 
a system by none. Its introduction to an incurious 
public some twenty years ago by Dr. J. Hutchinson 
Stirling has been very ludicrously described by Dr. 
Masson. His Secret of Hegel was met " with such 
a welcome as might be given to an elephant if, from 
the peculiar shape of the animal, one were uncer- 
tain which end of him was his head." Some said 
of "this uncouth and turbid book," " if this is Hegel 
in English, he might as well have remained in Ger- 
man." Others were unkind enough to say that Dr. 
Stirling kept all the Secret of Hegel to himself, even 
if he knew it. A score of years, however, has suf- 
'ficed to atone for this barbarian reception. Scores of 
leading thinkers have read, marked, learned, and in- 
wardly digested enough of Hegel's method and re- 
sults to thankfully acknowledge his great worth. Its 



6 Philosophy of Religion. 

influence is especially strong and pronounced at the 
Universities of Oxford and Glasgow. 

In Germany the cry of " back to Kant " and 
Neo-Kantianism is but the first step of the protest 
against the temporary materialistic and psychologi- 
cal thought which means a speedy return to Kant's 
successors, and especially to Hegel as the truest in- 
terpreter and the best finisher of Kant's great frag- 
ment. They hear with surprise that Hegel's sun is 
rising in America after it has set upon the fatherland. 
It is a sun that sets to rise again. It may safely be 
said, however, that there are no mere disciples and 
blind adherents of Hegel in America. Perhaps Dr. 
W. T. Harris has most nearly been a disciple and 
exponent of Hegel. Certainly as editor of the Jour- 
nal of Speculative Philosophy he has done more than 
any other man in America to introduce Hegel's 
method and works to us. He founded it for that 
express purpose in 1867. But as a thinker he has 
necessarily cast off the bonds of mere blind partisan 
discipleship. Replying to the complaint of the un- 
American character of the contents of the Journal, 
he said, " It is not American thought so much as 
American thinkers that we want." And to think in 
the philosophic way is to transcend all national lim- 
its. This is an apt reply, too, to Dr. McCosh's cry 
for an "American philosophy " in the first number of 
the new Princeton Review. So, among the rapidly 
increasing number of those who are studying Hegel 
in America, there is only the desire and the deter- 
mination to think thought and not merely to repro- 
duce the formulas of any national thinker. The great 
thinkers of all ages, the great contributors to the 
Science of Knowledge, are no mere external authori- 



Hegelianism — A Prefatory Study. 7 

ties. Their thought is to be digested and organ- 
ically reproduced necessarily, it is true, as American 
thought. 

Hegel is recognized as a thinker whose compre- 
hension of thought and its method no student of phi- 
losophy can fail to acknowledge as great among the 
greatest. But I judge it to be unjust to characterize 
these students of Hegelian philosophy as Hegelians 
either in the popular, untrue, or in the exact scientific 
sense of the name. " Bound to swear in the name of 
no master " in philosophy, and only in the name of 
Christ in religion, would better characterize them all, 
so far as I know. They recognize Hegel's as the 
latest great epoch-making contribution to the philo- 
sophic interpretation of the world and comprehension 
of humanity's experience. They are mastering and 
using his method rather than accepting all of the re- 
sults which this method yielded himself as he applied 
it to the great spheres of human experience. They 
are getting great help and looking for greater from 
the method which is greater than even his own em- 
ployment of it. Help in comprehension of experience 
may come from those who are not infallible in knowl- 
edge. 

I gladly give Prof. Edward Caird's estimate of 
the worth of the charge that Hegel's philosophy has 
entirely lost the credit in Germany which it partially 
retains in other countries. President Stanley Hall, 
indeed, says that it was this historical status of Hege- 
lianism that first weakened its hold upon his mind. 
" If by adherence to Hegel," says Prof. Caird,* " be 
meant that kind of discipleship which is content to 

* Hegel, by Prof. Edward Caird, LL. D., p. 223. 



Philosophy of Religion. 

be labelled with the name of Hegelian as a complete 
indication of all its ideas and tendencies, we might 
state the fact still more broadly. For there are few, 
if any, in any country, who could now take up the same 
position toward Hegel which was accepted by his 
immediate disciples." Philosophers are not creators, 
but merely interpreters of human experience. They 
do not spin from their own brain baseless dreams in 
place of substantial realities. They only comprehend 
the substantial reality beneath and permeating all 
concrete life — physical, social, and religious. 

Man is in vital relations with his Creator and 
Redeemer. In his religious life Jesus Christ is the 
fullness of all divine light and life. As men experi- 
ence their vital relations to him, they are filled with 
life and light. Philosophy then comes to interpret 
and comprehend this Christian experience, to trace 
in intellectual forms the movements of the divine 
Logos in all true life and light. In its truest sense 
philosophy is theology ; in its highest form it is Chris- 
tian theology. Its chief interest in Germany and the 
chief cause of the diverse schools of interpretation 
have come from its essentially theological character. 
Philosophy sees the universe as a process, as a mani- 
festation of God. The Substance which Pantheism 
puts back of all things is seen to be the self-revealing, 
conscious, intelligent, purposeful Subject — God. Feu- 
erbach and all other members of the " left wing " re- 
jected this Theistic interpretation which Hegel un- 
doubtedly gave the universe. They denied the es- 
sential validity of the laws of thought (the unity of 
thought and being), accepting them and all their crea- 
tions and implications as the work of the individual 
thinker, and finally as the mere result of materialistic 



Hegelianism — A Prefatory Study. 9 

conditions. From Hegel to Bruno Bauer was from 
Theism to materialism. Hegel himself always pro- 
fessed his belief in the doctrines of the Lutheran 
Church. Against both the rationalistic school and 
that of mere feeling or faith, he labored to show that 
the dogmatic creed is the rational development or 
intellectual exposition of what is implicit in Chris- 
tian experience. Goeschel, Gabler, Marheinecke, 
Daub, and the now venerable Erdmann of evangeli- 
cal Halle, took this position of Hegel in interpreting 
his system. They affirmed that Christian experience 
is the substance of their philosophy. On this ground 
they maintained the full personality of God, and like- 
wise defended historically the literal views given by 
the Scriptures of the person of Christ, as the God- 
man — the Mediator between the divine and the hu- 
man, in whose light we see light, and in whose life 
we have life. Dr. Dorner, in his History of Prot- 
estant Theology (vol. ii, pp. 365-367), affirms the 
same as to the teaching of these right-wing Hege- 
lians. 

In England and America, too, the interest in the 
study of Hegel is chiefly owing to the relation of his 
thought to religion and to Christianity as the abso- 
lute, full, and final religion. It attracts Christian 
thinkers seeking for intellectual comprehension of 
religious experience, faith, and facts. God and the 
universe, man and freedom, Jesus Christ the Recon- 
ciler and Finisher of all that is imperfect, all moving 
on in a divine process, which the light that is within 
man sees by means of the congenial but infinite Light 
that enswathes him ; in a word, the divine Logic 
in all experience is that which Christian thinkers 
above others should and do seek for. They are at- 



io Philosophy of Religion, 

tracted to Hegel, because they find him thinking 
mightily on the same ; and yet the chief opposition 
to the study of Hegel comes from the odium theologi- 
cum of Christian teachers. Hegel and his philosophy 
are abused with insensate epithets enough to warn all 
true (or stupid) Christians from having anything to 
do other than to revile this chief apologist of the 
Theistic and Christian interpretation of the universe. 
Pantheist, denier of human freedom and immortality, 
of the historical Christ, and of his eternal person and 
work, mere charlatan in philosophy and religion, 
whose real aim and tendency is the destruction of all 
that is real and great and true in the universe and 
man and Christianity, they ignorantly affirm Hegel 
to have been. They are moved with righteous but 
ignorant indignation against any one daring to even 
study Hegel, imposing the high theological and ec- 
clesiastical tariff of anathema for such daring offense. 
The object of this chapter * is to offer something 
toward abating this unjust and ungenerous attitude 
toward Hegelianism and its study. I can not pre- 
tend to have made an exhaustive study of Hegel or 
of German philosophy since Hegel. I write this 
chapter only in part from the results of independent 
study.f So much, indeed, has been mis-said about 

* This chapter is reprinted from The Church Review, April, 1886. 

f I give the following references to the best accessible English mate- 
rials on Hegel: Prof. Edward Caird's little volume on Hegel (English) 
is an introductory exposition of his philosophy, combining happily biog- 
raphy and popular exposition of the meaning and method of Hegel's 
Logic. His larger volume on The Philosophy of Kant is also a good in- 
troduction to Hegel. Dr. J. Hutchinson Stirling's Secret of Hegel is 
said to be helpful in the way of exposition. Prof. A. Seth's article in the 
Quarterly Review, "Mind," October, 1882, is as freely critical as it is 
justly appreciative. Principal J. Caird's Philosophy of Religion does as 



Hegelianism — A Prefatory Study, n 

Hegelianism that I am tempted to continue in this 
gossipy vein throughout this chapter and leave the 
philosophical exposition and vindication for future 
work. Indeed, anything like a satisfactory exposition 
of the Hegelian philosophy and its results is beyond 
the scope of any review article. I attempt only a pre- 
liminary clearing away of misconceptions. Dr. Seth 
deprecates the false humility of those students who 
represent themselves as merely picking up the crumbs 
at the banquet, merely guessing at his meaning with- 
out venturing to compass his thought. I do not 
assume such humility, for I do not understand how 
any real student of Hegel can long be ignorant of his 
secret or method, nor how any independent student 
can accept him as an infallible master either in his 
method or in his own employment of it, and much 
less in his own results in various spheres. But I do 
understand how no real student of Hegel can ever 
be the same man intellectually after that he was before 
his study of Hegel. The whole concrete experience 

well and as popularly for Hegel's Philosophic der Religion what his 
brother's little volume does for Hegel's Logic. Dr. W. T. Harris has de- 
voted unusual ability and labor in making Hegel known to American 
thinkers through his Journal of Speculative Philosophy, vols, i-xx, in 
which he has been aided by a corps of competent helpers. He has a 
volume of critical exposition of Hegel's Logic nearly ready for Grigg's 
German Philosophic Classics. . Dr. J. Steinforth Kedney's volume on 
Hegel's ^Esthetics is already published. Hegel's Philosophy of History 
is translated in Bohn's Library. Dr. W. Wallace has translated the text 
of the Logic and prefaced it with helpful introductory expositions. The 
following books may also be named as Hegelian, but not in any merely 
slavish or expository way : The Nation and The Republic of God, by Dr. 
E. Mulford ; Philosophy and Christianity, by Prof. George S. Morris, 
Ph. D. ; Prolegomena to Ethics and Introduction to Hume's Works, by 
the late T. H. Green, the recognized leader of Hegelianism at Oxford ; 
Ethical Studies, by F. H. Bradley. 
3 



12 Philosophy of Religion, 

of his life and that of humanity receives a new and 
divine interpretation and exposition — 

And by the vision splendid 
Is on his way attended. 

He finds in it the poem of the prose of every-day 
life, because it gives the essential truth and setting of 
that life. True poetry systematizes the chaotic, the 
multitudinous facts of experiences. So, as Dr. Stir- 
ling confessed, the system of Hegel is " in a certain 
sense only a poem." It is a poem as Christianity is a 
poem — a grand living system. It is in fact only the 
intellectual rhythm, the Logic of the Logos in whom 
are all things, " both which are in heaven and which 
are on earth." It is indeed always and everywhere 
the function of philosophy to point out this rhythmic 
movement of thought in all forms of life — to express 
all concrete experience in terms of thought. Philos- 
ophy is not all things, it is only the thoughtful com- 
prehension and expression of them. Christianity is 
not the product of a dialectic process, but it is its 
given concrete object. But its intellectual analysis 
is the inevitable sequent of its reception by thinking 
beings. It is true that the transcript which philoso- 
phy makes of great concrete wholes may be unat- 
tractive to us in our throbbing concrete life — very 
unlike the flesh and blood of reality ; and when taken 
for the whole, when ignoring that of which it is only 
the intellectual transcript, it becomes vainly puffed 
up and deleterious. " Feeling, intuition, and faith," 
as Hegel said, " belong to religion as essential ele- 
ments, and mere cognition of it is one-sided." But it 
is one side, and an essential side of the religion of in- 
tellectual beings. All theology is proof of this. Even 



Hegelianism — A Prefatory Study, 13 

Jacobi, the philosopher of Faith, declared that the 
reading of Kant's argument for the existence of God 
brought on a violent fit of palpitation of the heart. 
So great emotion may an intellectual vision awaken 
in heart and body as well as in mind. 

Hegel may indeed be justly accused of looking 
chiefly and always for the movement of thought in all 
forms of life. But this criticism is itself a valid criti- 
cism of all those attacks upon Hegel as a teacher of 
concrete forms of experience. Philosophy and Theol- 
ogy are both out of place in hours of our prof oundest 
religious emotion. Our communion with God at such 
times is not the immediate work of thought. But 
when we reflect upon such or any other experience 
of our own or of mankind, we seek for the thought, 
the Reason, implicit. in it. Philosophy may be said to 
be retrospective — looking back at the thought at work 
under the forms of Nature, Mind, Art, State, and 
Church— trying to comprehend all as the work and 
expression of governing immanent reason. This is 
not easy work ; and it is special work that demands, as 
other departments of science do, trained minds that 
also feel the need that it seeks to supply. Faith, feel- 
ing, the mere reasonings of the understanding, have 
their place in man's work ; but the worth of all knowl- 
edge and the reality of all being is also a question for 
man's study. The intellectual comprehension of the 
thought and reality of the unfolded universe — the 
manifestations of God as Subject rather than of sub- 
stance — this is the " vision splendid " of that philoso- 
phy which is thoroughly and essentially theological. 
With Hegel philosophy and theology are synony- 
mous. It is this that attracts and fascinates religious 
thinkers. As in the old Roman Empire "all roads 



14 Philosophy of Religion, 

lead to Rome," so in Hegel every finite truth leads 
up to and is explained in God. Perhaps a personal 
confession may not be out of place here, and may be 
of worth. My; own interest in this study began and 
continues as a purely theological one — the intellect- 
ual search for " God as the self-conscious Reason of 
all that really is." 7 That is Hegel's true^ first princi- 
ple. He early declared that "the great immediate 
interest of philosophy is to put God again absolutely 
at the head of the system as the one ground of all, 
the principium essendi et cognoscendu". Again, he de- 
voutly exclaims, " What knowledge is worth know- 
ing if God be unknowable ? " (Philosophic der Re- 
ligion, vol. i, p. 27.) This spirit is present through- 
out all of his works that I have read. His Logic is a 
Theology.* His Philosophy of History is a Theod- 
icy.f So, too, are his History of Philosophy % and 

* Hegel's Logic, pp. 133, 172, 248, Wallace's translation, and Jour- 
nal of Speculative Philosophy, iii, 369. 

f " That the history of the world, with all the changing scenes which 
its annals present, is this process of development and realization of spirit 
— this is the true Theodicy, the vindication. of God in history. Only 
this insight can reconcile spirit with the history of the world, viz., that 
what has happened and is happening every day is not only not * without 
God,' but is essentially his own work " (Philosophy of History, p. 477). 

% Speaking of the History of Philosophy he says : " For these thou- 
sands of years the same Architect has directed the work, and that Archi- 
tect is the one living Mind of which the nature is Thought and Self-Con- 
sciousness" (Logic, p. 18, Wallace's translation)* He goes on to say that 
differences of system which philosophy presents are not irreconcilable 
with unity. It is one philosophy at different degrees of completion. In 
his introduction to the History of Philosophy he states most plainly a 
Philosophy of the History of Philosophy, which is in most cheerful con- 
trast with the comfortless, saddening view maintained by Mr. George H. 
Lewes. Mr. Lewes's purpose throughout his History of Philosophy is to 
show the negative answer given by every system to the question, What is 
truth ? Each system is refuted by the succeeding ones, and the whole 



Hegelianism — A Prefatory Study. 15 

his Philosophy of Religion explications of God in the 
minds and hearts of men. 

Not only the name but also the nature and works 
of God are ever the theme to which he turns and in 
which he ends. He points out that philosophy seeks 
to apprehend (not create or evolve), by means of 
thought, the same truth that the religious mind has 
by faith. His last work was on The Arguments for 
the Existence of God, in which he treated the per- 
fect matter in these proofs as distinguished from the 
imperfect manner of statement. In the preliminary 
chapters of his Logic he had already criticised 
Kant's supposed destruction of these classic argu- 
ments. He maintained that no critical reasonings 
could destroy the necessity and right of the mind to 
rise from the finite to God ; that these arguments are 
only imperfect descriptions of the implicit relations 
of man and the universe to God and of the steps of 
the implicit logic of Religion. 

Man is a being that thinks, and therefore sound Com- 
mon Sense as well as Philosophy will not yield up their 
right of rising to God from and out of the empirical view 

"affords accumulated proofs of the impossibility of Philosophy." Some 
Christian teachers seem glad to use this sad skepticism as a defense of 
the faith. (Thus Christlieb, Modern Doubt and Christian Belief, p. 80.) 
Hegel well says : " The history of philosophy would be of all studies 
most saddening when it displayed to us the refutation of every system 
which time has produced. . . . The refutation of a system, however, only 
means that its limits are passed and that the fixed principle in it has been 
reduced to an organic element in the completer system that follows. 
Thus the history of philosophy in its true meaning deals not with the 
past, but with the eternal and the veritable present ; and in its results 
resembles not a museum of the aberrations of the human intellect, but a 
pantheon of godlike figures representing various stages of the immanent 
logic of all human thought " (Logic, p. 137). 



1 6 Philosophy of Religion, 

of the world. . . . And what men call the proofs of God's 
existence are seen to be ways of describing and analyzing 
the inward movement of the mind, which is the great think- 
er, that thinks the data of the senses. . . . This leap into 
the supersensible is thought, and nothing but thought. . . . 
Animals make no such passage, and in consequence they 
have no religion.* 

In fact his whole Logic, which contains his system 
or method in pure scientific form, seems to me to be 
but his explication of the nature and activities of 
God immanent in the actuality and order of the 
world, and transcendent as its efficient and final 
Cause. All objects of science, all terms of thought 
and forms of life lead out of themselves into a sup- 
porting, fulfilling, organized unity. In this com- 
pleted unity they find their truth and reality. That 
unity and truth is not external and mechanical, but 
living, loving, intelligent, and self-conscious. It is 
God, the Category of all categories — the Subject of 
all absolute predicates. All knowledge, from one 
side, is an exaltation of man toward God, while, re- 
garded from the other side, it is the manifestation of 
God to man.f 

* Hegel's Logic, p. 87, Wallace's translation. 

f The ancient philosophers have described God under the image of a 
round ball. But if that be his nature, God has unfolded it, and in the 
actual world he has opened the closed shell of truth into a system of 
nature, into a state system, a system of law and morality, into the system 
of the world's history. The shut fist has become an open hand, the 
fingers of which reach out to lay hold of man's mind and draw it to him- 
self. Nor is the human mind a mere abstruse intellect, blindly moving 
within its own secret recesses. It is no mere feeling and groping about in a 
vacuum, but an intelligent system of national organization. Of that sys- 
tem Thought is the summit in point of form, and thought may be de- 
scribed as the capability of surveying on its surface the expanse of Deity 



Hegelianism — A Prefatory Study. ly 

Both atheistic and, sad to put in the same com- 
pany, Christian Agnosticism are throughout thor- 
oughly repudiated. God knowable because self-man- 
ifesting, and man in duty bound to study this knowl- 
edge, are with Hegel self-evident and demonstrable 
principles. He studies human history as men of 
science do nature — with the presupposition that it is 
rational — the " coming to itself" of that human reason, 
which only "finds itself" and finds itself only, when 
it finds God's Reason immanent in all its knowledge, 
and this finding is mediated by " the Light of the 
World. " Assuredly he deserves the epithet that 
Novalis gave Spinoza, " the God-intoxicated," intel- 
lectually at least, and not without a tinge of the emo- 
tional and mystical. This I know will bring the quick 
retort, " Certainly, for he also was a pantheist." I once 
supposed this current charge to be true. I now know 
it to be false. Not only do his words but also his 
whole system refute the charge. " The Absolute Sub- 
stance of Spinoza," says Hegel, " certainly requires 
something to make it absolute Mind, and it is a right 
and proper requirement that God should be defined as 
absolute Mind " — that is, God is more than the panthe- 
istic substance. Again, " God is more than life : he is 
Mind." Again, in criticising Spinoza, he says that 
Substance, as accepted by Spinoza as defining God, 
" is, as. it were, a dark, shapeless abyss, which devours 
all definite content as utterly null, and produces from 

unfolded, or rather as the capability, by means of thinking over it, or 
entering into it, and then when the entrance has been secured, of think- 
ing over God's expansion of himself. To take this trouble is the ex- 
press duty and end of ends set before the thinking mind, ever since God 
laid aside his rolled-up form, and revealed himself. (Quoted from Hegel 
by Wallace in his translation of Hegel's Logic, p. xxii.) 



1 8 Philosophy of Religion. 

itself nothing that has a positive subsistence in itself. 
. . . God is Substance. He is, however, no less the 
Absolute Person. That he is the Absolute Person, 
however, is a point which the philosophy of Spinoza 
never perceived ; and on that side it falls short of the 
true notion of God which forms the content of relig- 
ious consciousness in Christianity." * 

Again, " Everything depends upon the absolute 
Truth being apprehended not merely as Substance, 
but as Subject." As opposed to both deistic and 
atheistic views of the universe, he might deserve the 
name pantheist, refusing to know a world without 
God, but emphasizing the truth that the world only 
has its being and truth in God. But pantheist in the 
sense of making all but mechanical parts of one stu- 
pendous substance or unknowable power, without 
will and without conscious intelligence, he was not. 
The fundamental idea of his system (in his Logic) is 
that the unity to which all things must be referred is 
a spiritual, self-conscious principle, showing that all 
other categories used to explain the world are resolv- 
able into this. Substance, Essence, Force, Law, 
Cause, are only partial expressions which find their 
truth in the highest category of self-conscious, self- 
determining Spirit. 

The monks of the East once made a riot in Alex- 
andria because Theophilus denied that God had a 
physical body. Hegel did not differ from Theophi- 
lus. Some of those who call him pantheist do not 
differ much from the rioting monks. Carlyle's retort 
was as sensible as the question whether or not he 
was a pantheist : " No ! I am not a/<2/z-theist, nor apot- 

* Hegel's Logic, pp. 89, 91, and 236, Wallace's translation. 



Hegelianism — A Prefatory Study. 19 

theist, either." Pantheist, in the Christian sense, I 
believe Hegel was. I have failed to find any view- 
expressed in his Logic or in his Philosophy of His- 
tory or in his Philosophy of Religion which derogates 
from the glory of God or the chief end of man. The 
intelligent, self-conscious, self-determining Subject 
embraces the universe and man without detriment 
either to the actuality or evanescence of the world or 
to the freedom and immortality of man. Hegel as- 
serts that the maxim of Pantheism is the doctrine of 
the eternity of matter, that " from nothing comes 
nothing " (Logic, p. 143). With this goes the doctrine 
of necessity. No system which does not include de- 
terminism and exclude freedom is really pantheis- 
tic. " Out of something comes everything by inevi- 
table necessity " — this form includes the double false- 
hood of pantheism. But a more strenuous opponent 
of these errors can not be found than Hegel. It is 
but the most absurd travesty of it which can define 
the Hegelian conception of God as " a self-evolving, 
impersonal process, which, after having traversed all 
the spheres of matter and mind, attains to a knowl- 
edge of its GW-head in the speculative reason of man." 
God, as self-conscious, is not the end of an evolution, 
but all things created find their reality in him. Men 
are not mechanical parts of God, nor do they lose 
their identity, though they find themselves truly, only 
in him. In proportion to their perfection they 
reflect him — become his created image. God in 
his manifestation as Creator is the maker of his im- 
age. He defines God to be the Pure Personality, 
whose self-conscious freedom is self-contained, not 
evolved, in time. The fleeting show (Schein) of tem- 
poral phenomena does not create nor destroy the 



20 Philosophy of Religion. 

self-consciousness of God or of man made in his im- 
age. That Hegel taught both the personality of 
God and the immortality of man is most strenuously 
maintained by the recognized exponent of Hegel's 
own view — Dr. Erdmann. By God, as Subject, not 
as pantheistic substance, he means the internal self- 
active nature, or the Essence which impels itself into 
phenomenal being. Man's immortality as well as his 
true being is in his organic, not mechanical, union 
with God. We do not charge pantheism upon the 
Biblical doctrine of creation, nor the absorption and 
loss of individual souls in Christ, upon St. John and 
St. Paul. God and man in Christ are freely spoken 
of as being in indissoluble union. It is no. longer we, 
but Christ in us. God determines, works in, us to 
will and to do of his good pleasure. ^In the fullness 
of the completed work of creation and Redemption 
" God shall be all in all." There is what may be 
called a Christian pantheism and determinism. And 
other than this I do not find in Hegel. Nature and 
Man are treated of, not as discordant and irreconcila- 
ble with God, but as forming one organic whole in 
him without losing their relative independent reality. ) 
^oH ; It may be worthy of notice that all English and 
American Hegelians^accept these truths, and also 
that they believe them to be Hegel's own teaching.* 

* The English Church Quarterly Review, January, 1884, contains a 
commendable exposition of English Hegelianism and its Religion by one 
who evidently is not a Hegelian. He says : " An impression may prob- 
ably be felt that Hegelianism is unfavorable to distinct belief in the Di- 
vine Personality. As regards the English branch of the school such an 
• accusation would be wholly untrue. The very principle of the system is 
that the Divine Mind is in unity with the human, and that both are per- 
sonal." He quotes Prof. Green's definition of personality as "the qual- 
ity in a subject of being consciously an object to itself. Again, " The 






Hegelianism — A Prefatory Study, 21 

Hegel's system rightly understood, I believe, as 
Gabler maintained, assumes a self-conscious Absolute 
Reason before the world process, and, as Daub main- 
tained, that in it reason is the organ, not the source 
of the knowledge of God, and, as Hegel himself 
maintained, that Christianity is the absolute full and 
final religion for man. 

Prof. Flint, of Edinburgh, said that he regarded 
Hegel's method most valuable and helpful and his 
results very rich mines of thought, but that we must 
divorce it from Hegel's Pantheism, which he found 
in the very first pages of his Logic. Prof. Harris 
(Journal of Speculative Philosophy, October, 1879) 
has briefly replied to the same charge made by Prof. 
Flint in his Anti-Theistic Theories. He points out 
that Prof. Flint misconceives the dialectic method of 
The Logic. Hegel's dialectic, like Plato's, is not a 
method of proceeding from a first principle which 
continues to remain valid, as, e.g., a mathematical 
axiom does. The dialectic shows that the first prin- 
ciples which are hypothetically placed at the basis 
are inadequate, and that they presuppose as their 
ground and logical condition a concreter principle. 
The concrete principle is at once the logical and the 

genuineness, not merely of Principal Caird's theism, but of his Chris- 
tianity, is undoubted." Again, " Hegelianism gives us no cosmos of ex- 
perience into which the mysteries and miracles of Christianity do not 
readily fall. . . . The whole connection of God with the world involves 
for the Hegelian who believes in God a relation in His nature to human- 
ity, which may truly be called a tendency toward incarnation." The 
same verdict must be rendered as to American Hegelianism by all who 
read the emphatic and devout maintenance of the stanchest Christian 
Theism in all the books that deserve the credit (or slur) of being He- 
gelian. Read Dr. Mulford's sublime words on " The Personality of 
God," The Republic of God, chap. ii. 



22 Philosophy of Religion, 

chronological presupposition. The dialectical pro- 
cedure is a retrograde movement from error back 
truth, from the abstract back to the concrete and 
true, from the finite and dependent back to the infi- 
nite and self-subsistent. We are proceeding toward 
a first principle rather than from one when we study 
Hegel's Logic. Hence Hegel does not (as Prof. 
Flint thinks) "profess to explain the generation of 
God, man, and nature from the pure Being that is 
pure nothing." He only shows that " pure Being," 
which is the highest principle according to many 
thinkers, is not so adequate as that of " Becoming," 
and this not so adequate as that which has become 
(or Being determinate), nor this as adequate as " in- 
finite being," etc. He passes in review all the cate- 
gories and discovers their defects — i. e., their pre- 
suppositions. This is merely a brief statement of 
Hegel's own interpretation of the categories. The 
first category of mere blank empty Being may be taken, 
as it often is, as a metaphysical definition of the abso- 
lute or of God. So with all the succeeding catego- 
ries — each of which is fuller, richer, concreter, and 
therefore an approximately more adequate definition 
of God. But each of these is reached not by evolu- 
tion from the lower one, but from the implications 
and presuppositions that the defects of the lower 
one exhibits. Indeed, Hegel in the Logic (page 
244, Wallace's translation) warns most explicitly 
and emphatically against this very misinterpreta- 
tion that Dr. Flint makes. The advance from mere 
being is to be regarded as a " deepening of being in 
itself whereby its inner nature is laid bare, rather 
than as an issuing of the more perfect from the less 
perfect." 



Hegeliantsm—A Prefatory Study, 23 

Each lower category is, and is not, till it is seen 
in relation with something higher and fuller. Each 
partial result, through its unsatisfactoriness, seeks the 
truth just beyond and yet implied in it. It is the 
unrest of the negative of each category or definition 
that impels the process onward till the last category 
of thought is reached — that of The Idea — Spirit, Self- 
conscious Reason, Self-determining Intelligence — 
God. God is not the end or result of this process, 
but he is the real presupposition that lies back of 
and gives comparative worth to every stage of the 
process. St. Augustine's exclamation as to our souls 
might well be applied to each of these imperfect cate- 
gories, Being, Essence, Causality, Mechanism, and Life 
— all but that of Spirit : 

Thou hast made us for thee, O God ! And our souls 
are restless till they rest in thee. 

Moreover, Hegel's doctrine of God is the Chris- 
tian and not the deistic or pantheistic doctrine. God 
is the real concrete infinite only because of his essen- 
tial Triune nature. In him all finite beings find, not 
lose, their reality. As a category either of thought 
or of being, Hegel did not treat it as Spinoza did 
substance — " as a mere terminus ad quern — a lion's den 
in which all the tracks of thought (and being) termi- 
nate, while none are seen to emerge from it." All 
finite beings emerge from it and exist in it, only being 
clothed sub specie ceternitatis : "All things in God" 
does not mean " nothing but God." Self-realization 
through self-sacrifice in a fuller life is the movement 
of Hegel's whole, philosophy. This, Prof. Caird says, 
he got from the study of Christianity. " Die to live " 
is the nearest possible expression of Hegel's philos- 
4 



24 Philosophy of Religion. 

ophy in one sentence. To him Christ's words, " He 
that saveth his life shall lose it, and he that loseth 
his life shall save it," is the first distinct expression 
of the very truth of the nature of all Spirit. The 
tracing of this through all the forms of Spirit is the 
whole work of his philosophy. The " more life and 
fuller that I want " is found only through dying unto 
the selfish self and living into the truer self. The 
Christian doctrine of God, as Triune, is the expres- 
sion of this nature of God's self-revelation, including 
the element of self-sacrifice. " What Christianity 
teaches is only that the law of the life of Spirit — the 
law of self-realization through self-abnegation — holds 
good for God as for man, and, indeed, that the Spirit 
that works in man to ' die to live ' is the Spirit of 
God. For Hegel such a doctrine was the demon- 
strated result of the whole idealistic movement 
which is summed up in his Logic. So far, then, as 
Christianity means this, it was not in any spirit of 
external accommodation that he tried to connect his 
doctrine with it. Rather it was the discovery of 
this as the essential meaning of Christianity which 
first enabled him to recognize it as the ultimate lesson 
of the idealistic movement of thought." * 

I have indeed barely touched upon the outskirts 
of the full refutation of the charge of pantheism. I 
have done less as regards the charge of his sublimat- 
ing all the facts and doctrines of Christianity into 
mythical products. The fuller and juster vindication 
against both these charges demands an exposition of 
at least his Logic and his Philosophic der Religion. 

* Caird's Hegel, p. 218. 



CHAPTER II. 

INTRODUCTORY. 

Hegel was radically and throughout a theologian. 
All his thought began, continued, and ended in that 
of Divinity. We may justly say that even the re- 
ligious element is pervasive of all his works. Writ- 
ing almost like a zealot against the current indif- 
ference to vital theology, he exclaims pathetically, 
" What knowledge would be worth the pains of ac- 
quiring if knowledge of God be not attainable ! " * 
He had the indispensable requisite for treating of re- 
ligion — that is, the love of religion within himself and 
sympathetic hospitality to all manifestations of it in 
the world. His Philosophic der Religion is thus the 
very heart of all his thinking. The posthumous ed- 
itor of this work (Dr. Marheineke) styles it " the high- 
est bloom of Hegel's philosophy." Pathos, power, 
sweetness, and righteous severity mingle in winning 
strains^ in the profound and scholastic exposition of 
man's highest relation. 

The Philosophy of Religion has not been in good 
repute among theologians till recently. This and the 
cognate Science of Religions, or Comparative Relig- 
ion, have been looked upon with suspicion as imply- 
ing or leading to the reduction of Christianity to a 

* Pliilosophie der Religion, vol. i, p. 37. 



26 Philosophy of Religion. 

level with other religions. There has lingered a relic 
of the method of some of the earlier Christian apolo- 
gists. All other religions were simply the work of 
the devil, the imitator, " the Ape " of God. He had 
cunningly introduced elements of truth into those 
masses of corruptions in order to more easily seduce 
mankind. Nor has the more general theory of the sys- 
tematic corruption of a primitive supernatural revela- 
tion given a much more generous or just estimation of 
the religions of the world. It is true that Clement 
of Alexandria and others taught a doctrine of the 
Logos as the Divine Pedagogue (®ew>9 HcuBaycoybs), 
which was essentially that of the modern philosophy 
of religion. But the successful trend in the Church 
was that which identified the Logos locally and ex- 
clusively with God's teaching in and through herself, 
till finally the possibility of a distinction between re- 
ligion in itself and the Church was a conception not 
to be allowed for a moment. The only ray of light 
granted by the theologians, who were also great men, 
was a certain donum naturale that served to curse 
rather than bless the heathen. Protestant Christian- 
ity inherited and emphasized the same narrow view 
of one exclusive channel for the work of God in hu- 
manity. Until recently the only classification allowed 
was that of Christianity and false religions. Any at- 
tempt to examine pagan religions impartially or to 
point out the vital truth in them that gave them their 
power over men was imputed to disloyalty to Chris- 
tianity. 

From the beginning of the fifteenth century the 
intellect of man began to break the shackles of igno- 
rance and authority. The Renaissance, the Reforma- 
tion, the almost simultaneous discovery of the great 



Introductory, 2 7 

globe earth and the greater vault of the heavens, and 
the growth of the historical and physical sciences, 
greatly widened the horizon of man's knowledge. 
Old Asia and new America, the civilizations and re- 
ligions of Greece, India, China, and Mexico, hurled 
heaps of new facts into men's minds. Wonder was 
followed by study and observation, this by necessary 
skepticism as to the traditional theories as to man, 
earth, and heavens, and crude, monster attempts at 
reconstructing new theories, too often disparaging 
the old in admiration of the new. Any final con- 
struction or synthesis of all the elements was far be- 
yond the range of the finite views and methods of the 
Eclair cissement. Rationalism, and Aufklaerung of the 
eighteenth century. These various national forms of 
the same narrow mental method were even less fitted 
for an appreciative, impartial, and scientific study of 
the various religions of the world than either Roman- 
ism or Protestantism. The theory of a primitive 
revelation and of the donum naturale gave them some 
elements of universality which deistic rationalism 
never possessed. Its general theory that religion was 
the invention of priests or poets or rulers still holds 
its place in the lower infidel discussions of to-day. It 
was reserved for the nineteenth century to make a 
scientific study of the religions of the world, and to 
arrive at a philosophic comprehension of what religion 
is as a universal and necessary part of human life. 

Two truths are now generally accepted : First, 
that there is such a branch of knowledge as the sci- 
ence of religions or comparative religion ; and, second, 
that the co-ordinate relation of God and man in re- 
ligion is organic and has a law or logic which may 
rightly be called the philosophy of religion. Chance 



28 Philosophy of Religion. 

and chaos are no longer allowed to reign in this de- 
partment of experience. Thought insists upon find- 
ing thought, spirit in finding spirit in religion. Phi- 
losophy, or the intelligent comprehension of concrete 
experience, is the one science with which mind can 
not long dispense. Least of all can the universal and 
necessary religious experience of humanity be left as 
a " mighty maze without a plan," as Hume virtually 
pronounced it to be. The science of religions is the 
appreciative, intelligent study of all the religious phe- 
nomena in the world. As comparative religion it has 
as its motto that he who knows only one religion knows 
none. This science may not yet be very far advanced ; 
but its progress in the making has been very rapid. 
Facts thus gathered, classified, and generalized then 
demand interpretation. What is religion whose mani- 
festations have been thus systematized ? Is it an il- 
lusion, an excrescence, or is it a reality ? Can spirit 
or intelligence find itself in it ? Thus the science of 
religions must be followed by the science or philoso- 
phy of religion. On any basis but that of skeptical 
agnosticism its reality must be affirmed. It is a real, 
reciprocal communion of God and man. In it the 
seeking and finding each of the other is real. The 
revelation may be slight and the worship ignorant, 
but in their various measures they are divinely and 
humanly rational and real. This idea of religion, as 
the mutual reconciliation of God and man, becomes 
the very center of all thought about religion. This 
reconciliation, the attainment of which is found to be 
the motive in all religion, exists in idea eternally. The 
logical, thoughtful development of the idea of relig- 
ion, which contains implicit phases or moments in its 
process or dialectic, constitutes the philosophy of re- 



Introductory, 29 

ligion. This idea in its eternal actuality is, as Hegel 
shows in Part III, only fully and intelligently stated 
in the Christian doctrine of the Holy Trinity. This 
is from the Divine standpoint. It is the eternal pro- 
cess or history of God. " God was first known in the 
Christian religion, and this is the meaning of its cen- 
tral doctrine of the Trinity." On the other hand, is 
the human side of the relation — the idea as it appears 
in human history. This history illustrates the phases 
or moments of the process of the idea. The science 
of religions illustrates, but only inadequately, the sci- 
ence or the philosophy of religion. It does not, how- 
ever, create it. It is claimed by some that the history 
of religions gives us the only philosophy of religion 
that we can have. This no theologian, much less 
Hegel, would allow. The intimate interrelations 
and mutual dependencies of the two must be granted. 
But this evolution in temporal history is to be trans- 
lated into a process of thought which transcends his- 
tory. The explication of this process of thought is 
theology or the science of religion. The religious 
experiences of man while illustrating, must themselves 
be viewed in the light of the fundamental idea of re- 
ligion. This furnishes the only adequate criterion of 
their place in the historical manifestation of the idea; 
and this Hegel insists and shows is only to be found 
in Christianity, the absolute religion — the ifkr)p(o[jLa or 
fullness of the revelation of the idea in time. Thus 
the philosophy of religion, though it comes last in 
time, is prior in idea. It is primary, inspiring, di- 
rective, and interpretative, as the plan is of the 
builded cathedral. The other is the objectified, mani- 
fested, interpreted, as well as suggestive, illustrative, 
confirmative, and corrective. 



30 Philosophy of Religion, 

Hegel is easily chief and master in this depart- 
ment. But he had his predecessors, into whose work 
he entered to carry it far toward completion. Les- 
sing may well be called the modern founder of the 
philosophy of religion. He restated and reaffirmed 
Clement's idea of revelation as a Divine education of 
the race. Child of the German rationalism as he was, 
he could not wholly free himself from its shackles. 
From Lessing to Schleiermacher was from rational- 
ism to faith, and on to Hegel went the process, till 
faith, as " abbreviated knowledge," was made explicit 
as thought. The idea which Lessing gave the thought 
of his time was forceful in freeing it from the shack- 
les of both theological and rationalistic dogmatism. 
It helped toward mental hospitality and philosophical 
comprehension, inasmuch as it considered religion 
as a whole process, and humanity as essentially relig- 
ious. Still, as a child of the Enlightenment (Auf- 
klaerung), he sought too exclusively for the essence of 
religion in morality, esteeming dogma, worship, and 
church as merely conventional and accessory. He 
failed to see in them, as he did see in morality, the 
genuine outcome of the same religious principle. 
This, too, was the error in Kant's philosophy of re- 
ligion. Duty alone was real. His Religion within 
the Bounds of mere Reason stripped religion of every- 
thing but the bald ethical. The relation between 
God and man was that of Wordworth's Duty : 

Stern daughter of the voice of God ! 

It was not conceived of as broader or more inti- 
mate, more congenial or loving, than it was under 
the old law. " Religion is the recognition of our 
duties as Divine commands." But what was his 



Introductory. 3 1 

conception of God, other than the bald deistic one 
of the current philosophy and theology as repre- 
sented by Wolff ? The abstract Infinite of the mere 
understanding, in no vital, necessary relations with 
the finite, the God afar off, who had none but arbi- 
trary mechanical connection with the world, was 
rightly held, as Kant had proved, to be unknowable, 
with whom man could have no conscious, real com- 
munion. The subjective Ego was the all of knowl- 
edge. The postulating of a great First Cause, as a 
Deus ex machind, was but an infirmity of reason, and 
was only God in name, an " otiose deity as a more or 
less ornamental appendage to the scheme of things." 

The idea of such a God, as Kant had himself dem- 
onstrated, no more proves his existence than the 
idea of a hundred dollars proves one's possession of 
them. The analogy is perfect, and hence also the 
demonstration. There is no more a real, vital, or- 
ganic, or kin-connection between such a God and 
man than there is between dollars and one's pocket. 
Only if God be a living God, in organic relations 
with his creatures, can he be known or his manifes- 
tation be discerned. Only if man is himself inexpli- 
cable except as sharing the inspiration and life of this 
present God, has religion any intelligible reality. 

Schleiermacher, Herder, and Jacobi lead in the 
reaction from this mechanical deism and individual- 
istic morality, and in maintaining the validity of the 
elements of faith, feeling, and the more mystical ele- 
ments of the religious consciousness. God again 
became the living, present, inspiring, loving God 
that religion demands, and the moral order of the 
world became the Divine life on earth. Fichte em- 
phasized the ethical element in this present Divine 



32 Philosophy of Religion. 

life in which men had a conscious part. Schelling 
saw God everywhere seeking for himself through all 
the series of intermediaries from brute matter to 
spiritual mind. But this became that kind of mysti- 
cism which to intelligence is but a misty bridging 
over of the schism between God and man that deism 
had left as its result. Thought still insisted upon 
satisfaction. Intelligence would not leave the field 
till it found its own larger self in the consciousness 
man had of communion with God. It gladly ac- 
cepted the advance made by mysticism upon deism. 
It accepted the grateful reality of the reunion of 
God with his creation and creatures. But it de- 
manded that the reunion be vital and organic — a 
logic of spirit, of intelligence, which man's spirit 
could know because he was in it. It demanded that 
the felt communion be explicated, as far as possible, 
as thought for thought. 

Hegel represented most fully this demand of the 
spirit for cognition of the content and implications of 
the religious consciousness. Gathering together the 
results of all previous attempts, he proceeded to an 
exposition of the idea, as the concrete content of all 
the facts and contrasts. In the misty bridge of feel- 
ing and faith he discerned the implicit and real logic 
of spirit binding man and God into an organic unity. 
He attempted to translate feeling into the language 
of thought in order to maintain it rather than to do 
away with it. He gave it more than a mere subjec- 
tive basis which continually sinks the mind into doubt 
and despair, or into indifferentism. This is really 
the motive and aim throughout his writings. But he 
gives it technical treatment in volumes xi and xii of 
his Werke, which contain Die Philosophic der Religion. 



Introductory. 33 

The most important parts of these volumes are 
the Introduction (Die Einleitung), pages 1-85 ; Part 
First, treating of the content of the idea, and the 
various phases of the religious relation ; and Part 
Third, giving an exposition and demonstration of 
Christianity as the absolute religion. Part Second of 
these volumes gives an exposition of the various re- 
ligions of the world as phases or moments in the 
struggling evolution of the idea till its full final mani- 
festation in Christianity. This is the least valuable, 
because the most empirical part of the volumes, de- 
pending as it does upon the fullness and correctness 
of the current knowledge of these religions. More 
knowledge of them may lead to placing them in dif- 
ferent positions as illustrating phases of the develop- 
ment of the idea. Here it is that the science of re- 
ligions can correct the science of religion. Exactness 
here is not essential, as it is not possible without fuller 
knowledge. He characterizes the Chinese religion 
as that of Measure, or temperate conduct ; Brahman- 
ism as that of Phantasy, or inebriate dream - life ; 
Buddhism as that of Self -involvement ; that of Egypt 
as the imbruted religion of Enigma, as symbolized by 
the Sphinx ; that of Greece as the religion of Beauty ; 
the Jewish as that of Sublimity ; and Christianity as 
the absolute religion, the fully revealed religion of 
truth and freedom. 

Thus he attempted a unification of all sides and 
phases of religion, and permeated and joined them 
all by one principle and one method, " the method of 
the self-explicating Idea." * Immense learning, severe 
scientific method in simple language, combine in 

* Vol. i, p. 59. 



34 Philosophy of Religion, 

rearing this massive temple to the indwelling living 
Deity. For throughout one feels the warm religious 
emotion of one who loved and worshiped God. In it, 
too, the polemical spirit burns like a consuming fire 
against the anti-theistic and anti-Christian theories of 
his day. And none of these called forth so much of 
his scathing criticism as the current rationalism in 
theology and philosophy. This produced works simi- 
lar to those of the English Deists and their Christian 
opponents as — e.g., Toland's Christianity not Mysteri- 
ous and Locke's Reasonableness of Christianity. Such 
an " Age of Reason " was more odious and foolish to 
Hegel than to any other devout defender of Chris- 
tianity, and his polemic against it is sufficient to de- 
stroy it forever in any intelligently religious mind. 
He maintained that to know God is eternal life. But 
this knowledge of God was not that of either the 
apologists or the opponents of Christianity in the 
eighteenth age of reason — not a knowledge of reasons 
pro and con, but of real vital experience of communion 
with God. 

I append the following brief vocabulary or expli- 
cation of the most pregnant of Hegel's key-words : 
" The notoriously troublesome word " Vorstellung I 
have rendered " representation," " figurate concep- 
tion," and " pictorial thought." It means literally a 
presentation or introduction which the mind makes 
to itself of absolute truth in terms of sense, under- 
standing, and imagination. It is picture-thinking, en- 
visaging the invisible in the visible. It is metaphor- 
ical, finite thought. It is the work of philosophy to 
elicit the latent infinite thought out of this form, to 
translate Vorstellung into Begriff. I have uniformly 
translated Begriff by " idea," to distinguish it from Idee 



Introductory. 35 

(Idea). A Begriff, " idea," is literally a gripping to- 
gether into unity the various elements or members of 
a concrete thought. It is a comprehension. Idee {Idea) 
is the Idea of all ideas, the ultimate comprehension 
of all unities. It is thought as a totality or system. 
It is the A0705 of all logics. It is God, as Absolute, 
self-conscious, voluntary Thought, vitalizing and com- 
prehending all ideas (Begriffe). 

The word aufheben has, as Hegel observes (Logic, 
155), the double signification of " to destroy " and " to 
preserve," as the Gospel fulfills the law. I have ren- 
dered it variously, as abrogate, fulfill, annul, transmute. 
Its exact signification is to reduce to " moments." A 
" moment " is a constituent element or factor in a 
unity. Its isolated reality is annulled by its being 
preserved as a dynamic element in a concrete unity. 
The acid and base are aufgehoben in the salt. The 
three Persons are moments in the Godhead. 

Vernunft is reason as speculative, synoptic, syn- 
thesizing, the faculty of unity or comprehension. 
Verstand is reason as the understanding which an- 
alyzes, defines, and holds separate elements as ulti- 
mate and independent data. It is the faculty of the 
finite. The dialectic is the protest of thought, negat- 
ing the abstract, partial conceptions of the under- 
standing. It is a phase of reason rising on stepping- 
stones of annulled abstractions to fulfilling concrete 
unity. All life and thought and progress are such 
only in virtue of this inherent element of the dialectic. 

Thought defines ; but thought also criticises and 
negates its partial definitions in higher ones. The 
dialectic is the restless protesting element of thought 
that is ever restless till it rests in the supreme con- 
crete unity, God. The whole of Chapter IV illus- 
5 



36 Philosophy of Religion. 

trates the dialectic of thought from the finite to the 
Infinite. Hegel's use of the terms abstract and con- 
crete is purely and finely philosophical. Ordinarily 
the term concrete is applied to something obvious to 
the senses, found in time and place, and abstract to 
any mere mental conception. Hegel uses abstract 
for that form of knowing which wrings a part or ele- 
ment out of its organic connection or relations of 
thought, and concrete for that form which grasps these 
elements indissolubly together in organic unity. Ab- 
stract is therefore a one-sided, sectarian view, and 
concrete is catholic, looking before and after and com- ' 
prehending all relations as elements of an idea (Be- 
griff). The understanding abstracts, while the reason 
concretes, gives a synoptic view of the various inter- 
connected and interdependent elements. Sense and 
Science are abstract ; philosophy is concrete. More- 
over, it is only in the true, organic, vital concrete 
that genuine necessity, Nothwendigkeit, is found. The 
ethical or spiritual alone gives the true type of an 
organism and the true significance of necessity. In 
such each member is at the same time an end in it- 
self and a means to the whole, and the whole realizes 
itself in each member and in the totality. Hegel re- 
fuses to commit the absurdity of defining an ethical 
by a physical organism. It is only when this is for- 
gotten that his persistent use of the term necessity 
seems to strangle freedom. In fact, with Hegel " the 
truth of necessity is freedom " (Logic, 243). The 
members of the ethical organism are linked by spir- 
itual necessity to one another, so that " if one mem- 
ber suffer all the members suffer with it." Each is 
not foreign to its limiting others. All are elements 
of a spiritual whole, being at home, realizing them- 



Introductory. 3 7 

selves only in and through this necessary relation 
with the others. This is the Christian conception 
of concrete, spiritually determined freedom. God's 
service is perfect freedom. All else is spiritual schism, 
which is bondage to death and the devil. The ab- 
stract sects of any idea, person, or institution can only 
be reconciled into their place as moments of an or- 
ganic unity by a process of mediation, Vermittelung. 
The immediate is the simple, sensuous, undeveloped. 
It is the state of nature, while the mediated is the 
state of culture, of realized being, of organic connec- 
tion. Man is abstractly rational, made in the image 
of God ; but it is only by a process of mediation, of 
culture, of discipline, that he becomes concretely 
such in the ethical organism of the kingdom of God. 
The absolutely mediated is that whose process of medi- 
ation is self-determined, whose realization is due to 
the evolution of its own forces through its organic 
relations to other elements and to the whole. Thus 
the finding one's self at home in others, and, above all, 
in God and his kingdom of spirits, is essential to true 
concrete freedom and self-realization. The same is 
true of all thoughts and of all institutions. 



CHAPTER III. 

HEGEL'S INTRODUCTION TO HIS PHILOSOPHY OF 
RELIGION.* 

Hegel begins by asking what the true conception 
of religion is, which is the object presented to the phi- 
losophy of religion. He answers it immediately in a 
passage which should become classic, as commanding 
immediate and universal admiration: " It is the realm 
where all enigmatical problems of the world are 
solved ; where all contradictions of deep, musing 
thought are unveiled and all pangs of feeling soothed. 
It is the region of eternal truth, rest, and peace. . . . 
The whole manifold of human relations, activities, joys, 
everything that man values and esteems, wherein he 
seeks his happiness, his glory, and his pride — all find 
their final middle point in religion, in the thought, con- 
sciousness, and feeling of God. God is, therefore, the 
beginning and the end of everything. He is the cen- 
ter which animates, maintains, and inspires everything. 
By means of religion man is placed in relation to this 
center, in which all his other relations converge, and 
is elevated to the realm of highest freedom, which is 
its own end and aim. This relation of freedom on 
the side of feeling is the joy which we call beatitude ; 

* Vorlesungen ueber die Philosophie der Religion, Zwei Baender, 
herausgegeben v. Phil. Marheineke. Berlin, 1840. 



Hegel's Introduction. 39 

... On the side of activity its sole office is to mani- 
fest the honor and to reveal the glory of God, so 
that man in this relation is no longer chiefly con- 
cerned with himself, his own interests and vanity, but 
rather with the absolute end and aim. All nations 
know that it is in their religious consciousness that 
they possess truth, and they have always looked upon 
religion as their chief worth, and as the Sunday of 
their lives. Whatever causes us doubt and anxiety, 
all our sorrows and cares, all the narrow interests of 
temporal life, we leave behind us upon the sands of 
time ; and as when we are standing upon the highest 
point of a mountain, removed beyond all narrow 
earthly sights, we may quietly view all the limits of 
the landscape and the world, so man, lifted above the 
hard actualities of life, looks upon it as a mere image, 
which this pure region mirrors in the beams of its 
spiritual sun, softening all its shades and contrasts 
and lights. Here the dark shadows of life are soft- 
ened into the image of a dream and transfigured into 
a mere frame for the radiance of the eternal to fill. 
. . . This is the general view, sentiment, or con- 
sciousness of religion, whose nature it is the object 
of these lectures to observe, examine, and under- 
stand." * He whose heart does not respond to this 
call away from the finite world can have no interest 
in this task. While it is the purpose of philosophy to 
demonstrate the necessity of religion and to lead men 
to cognize the religious elements in themselves, it 
does not propose^ to make a man religious in spite of 
himself. But no man is wholly without some rela- 
tion to this central interest of humanity. Religion is 

* Philosophic der Religion, vol. i, pp. 3-5. 



40 Philosophy of Religion. 

essential to him as a human being, and not an alien 
sensation. But the relation of religion to man de- 
pends much upon his general view of the world and 
of life. These views distort and tear away the true 
impulse of spirit in the direction of religion. The 
philosphy of religion must, therefore, first work its 
way through and above all these false views or phi- 
losophies of life. These begin outside of, but by 
their own movement are brought into contact and 
conflict with philosophy. 

I. The first of these is the separation of religion from 
the free worldly consciousness. 

(a.) Man has his week-days in which he busies 
himself with worldly affairs; his Sunday comes to 
bring him into new activities. The religion of the 
truly pious, unsophisticated man is not a special mat- 
ter to him, but it penetrates with its breath of flavor 
all his feelings and activities. His consciousness re- 
lates every aim and object of his daily life to God. 
But from this worldly side, vitiation and variance 
creep into his religion. As Wordsworth says — 

The world is too much with us ; late and soon, 
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers. 

The development of this variance may be desig- 
nated as the rise of the understanding and of human 
interests. The laws, qualities, orders, and character- 
istics of natural things and of the creations and ac- 
tivities of man are inquired into. He is conscious of 
himself as a knowing and a creative agent. Science, 
art, politics, methods of making life easier and culture 
wider, all these come to be looked upon as his own 
possessions. And with this comes the consciousness 
of a separation from the Sunday, consciousness of de- 



Hegel's Introduction. 41 

pendence for everything upon a higher power. Self- 
dependence rises in contrast with the spirit of humility 
and dependence. Still, man must recognize that the 
materials and means for all this work are given to him. 
The world and his mind and their powers are not his 
creations. He may and must still confess that God 
made them. As the worldly consciousness encroaches 
further, he makes his peace with religion by the gen- 
eral admission that God has made all things. 

(b.) But even where one makes this assertion in 
earnest, as a pious man, there is danger of variance 
creeping in. Piety particularizes and says that God 
made this and this. Everything is considered as a 
special Providence. Its view is the teleological one. 
But this again brings in the use of the understanding, 
which points out as many indications of defects and 
of absence of purpose as otherwise. The most beau- 
tiful flower may be a chalice filled with poison. The 
storm which purifies the air may devastate the earth. 
What is food to one is poison to another. The dis- 
ease is as real as medicine. This external, physical 
teleology of piety is weakened by the relative imper- 
fection of the physical process, and by the finiteness 
and separateness in which its objects are viewed. A 
more profound synthesis of these merely finite and 
external ends or aims must be made. The under- 
standing demands consistency and necessity. With 
this the principle of selfhood develops completely. 
The Ego becomes the center of relations. Cognition 
deals with these relations. It is no longer sufficient 
to designate God as the cause of the thunderbolt, or 
of a political revolution. The immediate finite cause 
is what is sought for. Thus our science may formu- 
late a world that does not need God. This is the 



42 Philosophy of Religion. 

primary attitude of Positivism, which makes a breach 
with all religion. Science and religion thus develop 
into such contrast that there seems to be nothing but 
positive opposition and enmity possible. Science is 
confident and proud. It knows that it knows, and 
denies any other than finite knowledge. Religion, 
with its earnest affirmation that there is a real super- 
finite, that God makes all things, is distrustful of 
cognition that has formulated a world of finite neces- 
sity. And yet cognition can not be bowed out of 
the controversy nor its results overlooked and denied. 
In the needed harmonization, in which God may ap- 
pear in the world and the world in God, full satisfac- 
tion must be given to the highest demands of cog- 
nition. While religion can not be dragged down into 
the realm of finitude, it must make £ wide enough 
synthesis to grasp all its contents. 

The need of this conciliation is more apparent in 
the Christian religion, because cognition is an inher- 
ent element in itself. Christianity concerns itself 
with the salvation of the individual from conscious 
alienation from God. I am to be saved. My own 
freedom and happiness are an end and aim. Self- 
hood is not lost in sacrifice. But this subjectivity, 
this selfhood is in itself the principle of cognition. 
This, however, again is sometimes made absolute, 
and the contrast developed again within Christianity 
itself of faith and cognition. Hence the various dis- 
cords of the day between head and heart. 

II. Hegel then passes to the question of the posi- 
tion of the philosphy of religion toward both philosophy 
and religion. 

The general relation of philosophy to religion is 
that of nearest kinship. Hegel never ceases to iden- 



Hegel's Introduction, 43 

tify them in respect, at least as to their subject-mat- 
ter. While all realms where thought is manifest are 
the fields of philosphy, there is none so congenial as 
that of religion, because it also is a universal, pene- 
trating and covering all other realms like philosophy. 
" The subject of religion, as well as of philosophy, is 
the eternal truth in its objectivity, or God, nothing 
else but God, and the explication of his nature." * 
Again : " Philosophy has for its aim the cognition of 
truth, the cognition of God, for he is the absolute 
truth, in so far that nothing else is worth knowing 
compared with God and his explication. Philoso- 
phy cognizes God as essentially concrete and spiritual, 
self-communicating like light. Whoever says God 
can not be cognized, says that God is envious, and 
he can not be in earnest in his belief, however much 
he may talk about him. Rationalism, the vanity of 
the understanding, is the most violent opponent of 
philosophy, and is offended when it demonstrates the 
presence of reason in the Christian religion ; when it 
shows that the witness of the spirit of truth is de- 
posited in religion. In philosophy, which is theol- 
ogy, the whole object is to point out the reason in 
religion. In philosophy, religion finds its justifica- 
tion from the standpoint of thinking consciousness, 
which unsophisticated piety does not need nor per- 
ceive." f But the faith of naive piety is only abbrevi- 
ated knowledge, which philosophy or theology expli- 
cates. Philosophy is falsely charged with placing 
itself above religion, for it has no other content than 
faith. It only gives this content in the form of think- 
ing. Thus religion and philosophy coalesce, differing 

* Philosophic der Religion, vol. i, p. 21. f Ibid. vol. ii, p. 353. 



44 Philosophy of Religion. 

only as theology and religion do — in regard to their 
mode of being occupied with God. And in this dif- 
ference are found all the difficulties which seem so 
insuperable. 

Philosophy takes religious ideas out of the domain 
of feeling and practical experience, and makes them 
objects of thought, seeks the thought implicit in them, 
and translates them into their equivalents in thought. 
Whatever is real is rational. Without this principle 
the cosmos would be chaos. Religion is the most 
real concern of man. Without it man would not be 
man. But, also, without thought man would not be 
man. And thought seeks its like in all realms of hu- 
man experience. Religion can not, if it would, sui- 
cidally avoid the scrutiny of intelligence. The 
thoughtful religious mind demands a rational expli- 
cation of the religious consciousness. The reflective 
thought of the mere understanding analyzes this into 
contrasts, oppositions, antinomies. Its rationalism 
dismembers and lets the life out of all religion. But 
this critical standpoint can never be more than tem- 
porary with a sincere man or age. The revolution- 
ary, iconoclastic rationalism is but the negative ele- 
ment that soon spurs the spirit on to a larger horizon 
and comprehension of truth. Philosophy must come 
to swallow up all such negative relations in victorious 
unity. Hence it comes after the positive sciences, 
with their negation of the absolute. Its duty is not 
to collect, observe, and classify, but chiefly to inter- 
pret. It seeks to translate the religious phenomena 
of the world into a process of thought, logical and 
rational, to give them rational significance and sys- 
tematic coherence and order. Speculative philosophy 
is the consciousness of the Idea (Idee), which is the 



Hegel's Introduction. 45 

concrete unity of all. differences and contrasts. Re- 
ligion also has for its subject the content of philosophy 
as a whole, grasped implicitly as a whole by faith and 
feeling. Thought merely seizes upon this whole, the 
absolute truth, and brings out to intelligence all its 
implicit contents and contrasts. 

The philosophy of religion starts with the presup- 
position that religion and religious ideas can be taken 
out of the domain of feeling into that of thought. It 
is simply a different attitude of the human spirit to- 
ward the same object — God. 

" What signifies the expression God ? " asks Hegel 
(vol. i, page 26). For philosophy it signifies the na- 
ture of God expressed in thought — a logical or intel- 
ligently explicated knowledge of him. For religion 
it signifies an image-concept, an example, an illustra- 
tion or picture corresponding to the logical definition 
of God, or to theology. Each answer implies and 
contains the other. They are but different modes of 
the occupation of the spirit with God. In both it is 
spirit finding spirit in mutual search. The philoso- 
phy of religion deals only with self-manifesting spirit 
— finite and Infinite. God is not its result, but its be- 
ginning. But spirit is rational in itself, and also mani- 
fests itself rationally. The philosophy of religion 
deals with this immanent, eternal, living rationality 
of the absolute spirit, and also with its phenomenal 
manifestations. It is not merely our subjective rea- 
sonings, the unvitalized rationalism of the individual 
finite understanding, as to the being and nature of 
God ; but it is simply the explication of the eternal 
and phenomenal process of spirit finding spirit, the 
reconciliation and vital relationing of God with man 
and man with God. It apprehends the process of 



46 Philosophy of Religion, 






losing the negative rationalism of the individual and 
the finding its truer self in the life and being of God. 
Such, in brief and imperfect exposition, is Hegel's 
essentially religious attitude in all his thinking. For 
this is always and everywhere an explication of spirit. 
He might well have exclaimed with the devout 
Kepler, " I read thy thoughts after thee, O God ! " 
Hegel next treats of the relation of the philosophy of 
religion to positive or dogmatic religion. This is em- 
bodied in the Creeds and in Systematic Divinity as 
based upon the Bible. In all definitions of dogma 
reason forms an element. " At first thinking was al- 
lowed to be merely the exegesis which collects the 
thoughts of the Bible." But, as matter of fact, rea- 
son contains inherent principles and presuppositions 
which come into play in the work of interpretation, 
which must be more than mere verbal translation, 
substituting one word for another of the same scope. 
Explication and systematization must explain and sys- 
tematize in accordance with mental principles and 
prejudices. 

Commentaries on the Bible often give us the cur- 
rent rather than Scriptural conceptions. There is 
some reason for the couplet : 

This is the book where each his dogma seeks, 
And this the book where each his dogma finds. 

Exposition is often imposition ; or, as Hegel ex- 
presses it, " the Bible has been treated like a nose of 
wax." 

Thus rationalistic theology sprang up and pro- 
ceeded till it put itself in opposition to the Bible and 
to Church dogma. The mere understanding takes 
the facts and doctrines of Spirit in its finite molds 



Hegel's Introduction. 47 

and ends in annihilating the religious content and 
completely impoverishing Spirit. This rationalism 
(Aufklarung) led to the baldest deism and morality. 
But Hegel here, and elsewhere at greater length, 
emphatically renounces and controverts this ration- 
alism. Its abstract metaphysics of the understanding 
analyzes all life out of Spirit. It separates God and 
man. It rests content with making God the great 
outside First Cause, an otiose Deity, not even so much 
as a Deus ex machina, to occasionally interfere with his 
foreign, outcast cosmos. But the thinking reason of 
Spirit conceives God as essentially concrete fullness. 
The doctrine of the Holy Trinity is absolutely essen- 
tial to the conception of God as eternal, living Spirit. 
(This assertion is maintained and fully developed 
only in Part III of the second volume.) The phi- 
losophy of religion is the thinking explication of this 
Concrete Spirit. It disdains the dusty road of ration- 
alistic theology, and can not stand in the opposition 
to Church dogmas that it does. 

On the contrary, its kinship with positive doctrine is 
infinitely greater than appears at first glance, and the re- 
habilitation of the dogma of the Church, after it had been 
reduced by the understanding to a minimum, is so largely 
the work of philosophy that, for this very reason — which is 
its true content — it has been decried as an obscuration of 
spirit by a rationalistic theology, which does not rise above 
the limits of the understanding.* 

Every ray of light from the Spirit, indeed, appears 
as an obscuration to the night of rationalism. It 
hates philosophy because it has rehabilitated what 
it thought it had reduced to disjecta membra. The 

* Philosophic der Religion, vol. i, p. 33. 



48 Philosophy of Religion. 

Creed-breaking age of the rationalism of the under- 
standing is followed by a Creed-restating age of the 
comprehensive and synthetic reason. There can not 
be two kinds of reason and two kinds of Spirit — 
Divine and human — absolutely different from each 
other. Hence philosophy can not be at variance 
with religion. 

Spirit, in so far as it is the Spirit of God, is not a Spirit 
beyond the stars, beyond the world ; God is present, omni- 
present, and as Spirit he is in every spirit. God is a living 
God, all energy and action. Religion is a creation of the 
Divine activity and not the invention of man. The expres- 
sion that God as reason rules the world would be sense- 
less did we not assume that it refers to religion also, and 
that the Divine Spirit is active in the determination and 
formation of it. The perfection of reason through thinking 
does not stand in any contrast to the Spirit, and, therefore, 
it can not absolutely differ from the work which Spirit has 
produced in religion. The object of reason is reason itself, 
Spirit, Divine Spirit* 

I have translated these passages in full that none 
may doubt the earnestness of Hegel's scornful re- 
pudiation of the rationistic theology. Theologians 
may refuse this succor, or even take offense at seeing 
their doctrine stated in terms of reason ; but when 
once cognition has arisen, its rights can not be 
withheld. It will either stop in the Dead Sea of 
rationalism or lead on to the Mediterranean of phi- 
losophy. Hegel found, in his day, many tendencies 
and principles, both religious and rationalistic, that 
were hostile to philosophy's taking religion for the 
subject of its investigation. He, therefore, briefly 

* Philosophic der Religion, vol. i, p. 34. 



Hegel's Introduction. 49 

considers these hostile principles, claiming to find in 
them all, or in their comprehension, the historical 
element out of which the perfect philosophical think- 
ing has developed itself. He finds in his day that 
men's minds are so occupied with the knowledge of 
finite, secular things, that knowledge of Divinity has 
but little real interest for them. The unbounded 
growth of the sciences has quenched the nobler long- 
ing to search after the knowledge of God, has prac- 
tically rendered us securi adversus Deum. But in 
reality none of these things are worth knowing if 
God be not knowable. Our vanity is really our 
degradation. Even theologians are found who aid 
in this most unchristian view of the unknowableness 
of God. 

1. There is great indifference to Church dogmas. 
Their significance is minimized or ignored. Many 
fail to attach proper importance to the dogmas of 
the Trinity, of the Resurrection, and to miracles. 
Not only rationalism, but even pious theologians, 
reduce the doctrine of the Divinity of Christ to its 
lowest significance. The current religious literature 
fully discloses this indifference to orthodox dogma. 
Philosophy, on the other hand, is attempting to reach 
a comprehension and a higher appreciation of these 
Church dogmas, and thus to replace them in their 
true value. 

2. Again, this depreciated value of dogmas is 
shown by the historical method of treating them. The 
interest is not in their truth, but in their historical 
origin and growth. These theologians, whether be- 
longing to the historical school or to that of tradi- 
tion, are " like clerks of some mercantile house, who 
keep account only of somebody else's wealth without 



50 Philosophy of Religion. 

having any property of their own ; it is true they 
receive a salary ; but their sole merit is, that they 
serve in recording the wealth of others. . . . They 
know as little of God as the blind man knows of the 
picture whose frame he has felt. All they know is, 
how a certain dogma was framed by this or that 
Council, what reasons the framers advanced, and 
how the one view or the other predominated."* 
But they lack the one thing needful, the main point 
in both philosophy and religion — the entering of the 
mind into a direct communication with the highest 
interests. 

3. Again, the theory of immediate or intuitive 
knowledge of God arises to rebuff philosophic intel- 
ligence in the sphere of religion. Faith, feeling, the 
testimony of the Spirit to each soul, is claimed to be 
the highest possible experience. This is much more 
congenial to philosophy than the other two attitudes. 
It is really the first stage, of philosophic knowing, 
which only goes on to see and to comprehend what 
is implied in this direct personal knowledge of God. 

Hegel makes a fuller examination and criticism of 
these hostile and yet helpful principles in Part I of 
his work — The Idea or Conception of Religion. 

Before entering upon this, however, he states 
briefly the objections to any philosophy of religion. 
Is a rational knowledge of religion possible ? Is not 
reason quite presumptuous in attempting this task ? 
Some object to its competency to deal with religion 
as a kind of truth that has been authoritatively re- 
vealed ; but if religion is real and cognition an essen- 
tial part of man, then they can not be kept separate 

* Philosophic der Religion, vol. i, p. 42. 



Hegel's Introduction. 51 

except by doing violence to one or the other as both 
rationalism and Romanism do. Others deny the 
competency of reason to attain knowledge of any- 
thing but finite phenomena, as positivism and agnos- 
ticism. Others maintain that the only religious ex- 
perience possible is in the realm of feeling — of the 
accidental feeling of individual subjectivity. This 
leads to the denial of God's objectivity and finally to 
atheism. Each man's God is the product of his own 
feeling, which may be held to be either psychological 
or even physiological. The so-called Left-wing He- 
gelians, Feuerbach and Bruno Bauer, gave this athe- 
istic and materialistic interpretation to religion. It 
need scarcely be said that Hegel would not consider 
them worthy of any sane man's belief. 

But how do we know that reason is competent 
to deal with religion ? A criticism of the organ of 
knowledge is still insisted upon. This was the futile 
task of Kant's Critique of the Pure Reason, for this 
criticism must ever be done with the instrument un- 
der criticism. Reason alone can examine reason, 
which presupposes, what it tries to prove, its capacity 
and its rationality. It is the futile task of learning to 
swim before going into water. Its capacity can only 
be proved in its use. It is often, too, the suicidal 
task of sawing off the limb which bears one up. As 
a matter of fact reason is the organ and reason is also 
the object of thought. Whatever is real is rational and 
whatever is rational is real In religion as in other 
realities reason only finds itself, its other, larger, truer 
complementary self. Philosophy as well as the finite 
sciences has real subject-matter — reason, spirit, God 
— and a competent organ of knowledge. God is not 
to be demonstrated as an external, alien object, but 



52 Philosophy of Religion. 

he is felt, found, and followed in all rational activity 
of spirit. He is not proved or known by anything 
foreign to his own being. He reveals himself in 
thought and to thought. A philosophy of religion 
is simply the tracing the process of thought in the 
relation of finite spirit to its congenial infinite spirit, 
the Father — a process which is implicit in religious 
feelings, activities, and worship. It only presupposes 
that religion is not a chaos, a chance irrational realm, 
but a realm of reason, of spirit. It is this rationality 
of the real that binds God and man in no merely 
arbitrary or accidental relations. Kinship is every- 
where present. The old metaphysical distinction of 
the abstract infinite which made only a deistic theol- 
ogy possible is replaced by the true concrete Infinite, 
which is the organic, vital correlation of spirit. The 
rigid opposition and alienation of Infinite and finite, 
of God and man, is the false assumption that makes a 
philosophy of religion or any philosophy or cosmical 
comprehension impossible. The fundamental notion 
that makes any philosophy possible is the fact of the 
genuine concrete Infinite, which makes the whole 
earth kin and binds it with chains of gold to the 
head and heart as well as to the feet of God. This 
unity of correlatives, as of parent and child, is the 
true starting-point, the goal and also the guiding 
thread of method in explication of which Hegel is 
always engaged, but in no place in such profound 
and convincing way as in his Philosophic der Re- 
ligion. 

Hegel concludes his Introduction by giving a 
classification of the whole subject. We at once note 
the triplicity that characterizes all his works — A, B, 
C; a, b, c; a, /3, 7; I, II, III ; 1, 2, 3, form the ap- 



Hegel's Introduction. 53 

parently mechanical and arbitrary divisions which 
everywhere meet the eye. 

But with Hegel this results naturally from his 
method — that of the self-explication or self-unfolding 
of the idea or comprehensive concept of religion. 
This manifests itself primarily in its universality ; sec- 
ondarily, in its particularity or differentiation ; third- 
ly, in the ripe and rich individuality, or synthesis of 
the unity and difference — the U. P. I. of formal logic. 

" This is the rhythm, the pure eternal life of spirit 
itself, without which it would be a corpse. It be- 
longs to the spirit to manifest itself as its own object. 
But at this standpoint it is merely finite. Its third 
phase is where it finds its own self in this objectivity, 
becomes at-one with it, and thereby attains its free- 
dom. For freedom is this being at home in what once 
seemed foreign." 

I. The general idea or conception of religion in 
its universality, as faith and cultus. 

II. The various pre-Christian religions, regarded 
as specializations or particular forms of the general 
conception. 

III. Christianity as revealed, or absolute religion, 
the full adequate realization of the conception of re- 
ligion. 

I. The general conception, or idea of religion, is 
not abstract and contentless like the general concepts 
of formal logic and unphilosophical sciences. It 
contains the whole nature of the subject, as the seed 
contains the trunk and branches, the sap, flower, and 
fruit of the tree, but not in such a way that one can 
see them through a microscope, before their actual 
evolution from the seed. 

1. The phase of universality is a phase of thinking. 



54 Philosophy of Religion. 

Religion may have its historical starting-point in the 
sensuous and finite, but thought is always at work 
upon this crude form, interpreting into some intelli- 
gible form. It is not merely emotional. God is not 
the highest feeling but the highest thought, and to 
this all true religion leads us. Even among men the 
highest spiritual relationship can not exist without 
intellectual culture. 

2. But when this universal idea proceeds to self- 
specification, as it does in the subjective conscious- 
ness of the individual, the phase of contradiction ap- 
pears. The thought and the thinker are two com- 
batants. I think the universal, the absolute, and yet 
I am the finite and empirical ; I am the middle term 
of the syllogism, containing only the characteristics 
of the two extremes. I am thus not merely one of 
the two struggling elements, but I am the struggle 
itself (Romans vii, 15). 

This relation of opposing elements passes through 
the forms of (1) Feeling, (2) Sense-perception, and (3) 
Representation or pictorial thought, till pure thought 
is reached, where the religious consciousness will com- 
prehend itself in its fully explicated conception or 
idea. Thus the content of religion may, for different 
persons, or for the same person at different times, be 
either felt or imagined or thought. 

3. From this standpoint of God and man the pri- 
mary religious relation is that o( fear toward an ab- 
solute, awful, arbitrary power. Some have main- 
tained that all religion thus originated in fear. 

Primus in orbe deos fecit timor. 

But fear separates. One flees from what he fears. 
Religion has to unite. Hence this standpoint must 



Hegel's Introduction 55 

be overcome, and man recognize his true essence to 
be in God. He must come to recognize himself as 
made in God's image, the child of God. The pro- 
cess of this reconciliation constitutes the phase of 
cultus or worship. The cultus embraces the whole 
internal and external activity which has for its object 
the bringing about this at-one-ment, this transforma- 
tion of fear into love. It is too often used with refer- 
ence merely to the outward and visible part, not lay- 
ing sufficient stress upon the inward and spiritual 
activity of the soul with God. But the Christian 
cultus embraces not only sacraments, rites, and cere- 
monies, but also the inward history of the " way of 
salvation " that repentance, conversion, regeneration, 
and sanctification, which can only take place within 
the soul under God's grace. 

In this true cultus lies the real reconciliation of 
the two conceptions of God, as transcendent and im- 
manent. When God is recognized as without and 
above, as an object of consciousness among other ob- 
jects, there can be no real reconciliation in works of 
external worship — in lip, knee, and hand service. 
But when the Divine is recognized within the soul, 
as an act of self-consciousness, there is no reconcilia- 
tion to be effected, and quietism displaces all cultus. 
Hegel notes especially the barrenness of cultus re- 
sulting from the merely immanent conception of 
God. Without the transcendent relation of God and 
our consequently obligatory relation to him, all 
cultus shrinks into mere subjective emotions and 
sentiments. " The cultus contains as essential ele- 
ments the actions, the enjoyments, the assurances, 
the confirmations and attestation of a Supreme Be- 
ing. But these can have no place if the objective 



56 



Philosophy of Religion. 



and obligatory element is lacking in them. For this 
would cut off progress of consciousness to objective 
knowledge, and likewise progress from subjective 
emotion to action. Each of these is most intimately 
connected with the other. Man's idea of his obliga- 
tion in regard to God depends upon his conception 
of God ; his self-consciousness corresponds to his 
consciousness. Neither can he conceive of any defi- 
nite, obligatory action in regard to God, if he has no 
knowledge or definite conception of him as an ob- 
jective existence. Only when religion becomes a 
real relation, and contains the difference of conscious- 
ness can the cultus assume its true form and become 
a living process in the annulment of the difference. 
But this movement of the cultus is not limited to this 
inwardness in which consciousness frees itself from 
its finitude and becomes consciousness of its essence. 
In this, the subject knowing himself to be in God, 
enters the source of his life. But cultus is not merely 
internal. Its infinite life begins to develop in an ex- 
ternal direction also ; for the individual's life in the 
world has the substantial social consciousness for his 
basis. Just how he will determine his aims in life 
depends on the consciousness of its essential truth. 
It is on this side that religion reflects itself in world- 
ly affairs, and the knowledge of the world makes its 
appearance. This entrance into the real world is 
essential to religion, where it appears in the form of 
social morality " (p. 70). 

The cultus, therefore, generally speaking, is the 
eternal process of the subject positing itself as identi- 
cal with its essence. God becomes his God. The 
transcendent object of consciousness becomes the 
immanent self-consciousness. The reconciliation of 



Hegel's Introduction. . 57 

the two conceptions of God, however, is only reached 
in cultus as a process of presupposed unity of differ- 
entiation and of reconciliation. 

The Incarnation, the unity of God and man as an 
external fact, represents the unity. This essential 
element of religion is found in some distorted form 
in all religions. So, also, is the estrangement of man 
from God, the Christian doctrine of sin being its 
profoundest form. But this evil is seen to be foreign 
and hostile to me. O wretched man ! none can de- 
liver from the body of this death but God, through 
Jesus Christ, who is the perfect man. So we finally 
come to fully and freely " delight in the law of the 
Lord," as our own law. And thus the transcendent 
God becomes immanent ; from being merely an ob- 
ject of Consciousness, he becomes our perfect Self- 
Consciousness. 

II. Positive {pre-Christian) Religions. — The whole of 
Part I is devoted to the discussion of the above given 
phases of religion in its universal idea. But this uni- 
versal is now to unfold, to particularize itself, to posit 
its elements of differentiation. The idea exists only 
as activity. Religion can not exist as mere idea. It 
becomes self-explicating, self-actualizing in the sphere 
of human consciousness. This is the material in 
which the idea realizes itself. The seed bursts forth 
into differences. This is only a mid-station to the 
end. It is not the end any more than the child is the 
man. Now, these mid-stations of the self-explicating 
idea form the various positive or pre-Christian re- 
ligions. These, indeed, are not true religion, revealed 
religion, our religion. But they are all contained in 
ours, because they are essential, though subordinate 
stages, in the whole process toward fully revealed 



58 » Philosophy of Religion. 

religion. They are not, and they are, foreign ele- 
ments. In their historical aspects, as actual religions 
of men, claiming to be true, they are false, and pre- 
sent most uncongenial and irreligious aspects. But, 
so far as they represent phases of the idea, moments 
in its process toward perfect self-realization, they are 
neither foreign nor false. Isolated they are false, 
made elements of the concrete truth they are not. 
" These phases, in their lower forms, appear as fore- 
bodings or superstitions which grow by accident, 
like flowers and other forms of nature." And yet 
even here there is an underworking of some essential 
phase of the idea of religion itself. Thus the thought 
of incarnation is found in every religion, however 
far it may be below the Christian conception. These 
religions often give a most distorted and whimsical 
conception of God and his worship. But it is wrong 
to see nothing in them but superstition and fraud, or 
to content ourselves with a mere natural history sort 
of a study of them. We must seek their meaning, 
interpret them, find the rational element in them. 
They also were fellow human beings who conceived 
and believed these religions. Nothing human is 
without some shade of reason. And what is human 
and rational in them is ours, though only an inferior 
and passing phase of our higher conception. This 
does not imply a justification of their horrible and 
absurd parts ; but it does imply that they all are his- 
torical manifestations (with all the misrepresentation 
that this implies) of various phases of the idea on its 
way to the goal of adequate manifestation or per- 
fected self-consciousness. The philosophical contem- 
plation of these religions thus differs from the his- 
torical. The one considers them from the point of 



Hegel's Introduction. 59 

view of the perfect idea of religion, while the other 
studies only their accidental external forms. Both 
profess to study only that which is — the one what is 
rationally, the other what is temporally and acci- 
dentally. In order to study them in the higher way, 
in the light of the idea of religion, we ask of each re- 
ligion (1) what is its conception of God, and (2) how 
does this conception affect the worshiper's concep- 
tion of himself ? The conception may be lofty enough 
to beget the conception of his own imperishable na- 
ture. Thus, the conception of the soul's immortality 
enters into the history of religion as an essential ele- 
ment. 

The conception of God gives the basis for a classi- 
fication of these religions, which we give in full in 
Chapter VII. We note here only the three main 
divisions: 1. Nature Religions. 2. Religions in which 
spiritual individuality asserts itself. 3. Religions of 
free personality. 

III. Revealed or Manifest Religion. — The process of 
the idea is not an aimless, endless one. " It is neces- 
sarily implied in the idea of religion, that spirit must 
here as elsewhere run its course. It is really spirit 
in so far as it exists through negating (swallowing, 
digesting, and assimilating) all finite forms of itself, 
thus becoming the real concrete or absolute." 

The characteristics of the idea as actualized in the 
various pre-Christian religions are seen to be self- 
characterizations of the idea. These partial reflec- 
tions, false by themselves, are then taken up by the 
return movement of the idea upon itself. Its own 
content thus becomes adequate to itself ; and this 
constitutes revealed or realized religion, in which 
God is manifest. This is the absolute religion, or 
7 



Philosophy of Religion. 

Christianity. Christianity is the realized fulfillment 
of all preceding religions, but not merely the sum 
and result of them. Nor is it, like them, temporary 
and finite. It does not pass over into another, for it 
is ultimate, the perfect realization of the idea of re- 
ligion. It reveals the intrinsic unity of the Divine 
and human nature. This is the ne plus ultra of re- 
ligion. At first there was a veil over religion, and it 
did not appear in its truth. In due time religion ap- 
peared unveiled. This was not an accidental or arbi- 
trary time, but a time fixed in the essential and eternal 
counsel of God, chosen by eternal reason and wis- 
dom. It is this idea of religion itself, the Divine idea, 
the Idea of God himself, which has thus specified 
itself in this course of development toward its own 
ultimate realization. 

" This course of religion is its true theodicy. It 
display's all the productions of the Spirit and every 
form of its self-cognition as necessary — necessary, that 
is, because spirit is that living, active impulse which 
attains self-consciousness or self-realization as medi- 
ated by the series of its own self-posited differen- 
tiations. Such self-knowledge is absolute truth."* 
He elsewhere explicates the absolute religion as : " (a) 
The Revealed Religion, (b) The positive or externally 
revealed religion, which seeking and finding and re- 
alizing man, becomes (c) the Religion of truth and 
freedom." f 

* Page 84. f Vol. ii, p. 192. 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE VITAL IDEA (BEGRIFF) OF RELIGION.* 

Proper exposition demands amplification. Am- 
plification means addition as well as subtraction from 
the text. In this chapter I add much and subtract 
more. I merely follow the outline given by Hegel, 
and do not misrepresent his thought. I develop 
the inferences and implications suggested to my 
mind, rather than give a direct exposition of the 
text. If it is not Hegel's Philosophy of Religion, it 
is Hegelian in method and spirit. 

Hegel begins this part of the work with the 
question, " What is our starting-point, and how have 
we won it ? " 

In the work of the Logic, God the Absolute 
Idea, the votjo-l^ vorj<r€a)$, the Categories of categories, 
is found to be the ultimate reality, the thought which 
alone has being in itself, and which imparts what- 
ever measure of thought and being that all else has 
to it. This is the ripe, concrete result of the Logic, 
or philosophy proper. The Philosophy of Religion 
is a part of a system. In his Encyclopaedia of the 
Philosophical Sciences Hegel includes the whole in 
three main divisions: i, Logic, or the Science of 
the Idea ; 2, the philosophy of nature ; and, 3, the 

* Hegel's Religions-Philosophie, I, Part First, pp. 87-252. 



62 Philosophy of Religion, 

philosophy of spirit. The first, as we have said, 
might better be called metaphysics ; the third in- 
cludes psychology and anthropology, the philoso- 
phy of the state, and the philosophy of Absolute 
Spirit. This last comprises a brief outline of the 
philosophy of art, the philosophy of revealed re- 
ligion, and philosophy proper. All these lead to 
the fuller comprehension of absolute spirit. All are 
but parts of the one stupendous whole of this reality, 
which is Thought, Idea, Spirit, God. Thus his sys- 
tem is encyclopedic, aiming at the rational compre- 
hension and synthesis of the totality of being. It is 
an attempt to unveil what is the rational or real being 
of the universe, which is Thought — not our subjective 
thought but that Thought or Logos, which is the life 
and substance of all phenomenal being. God reveals 
himself, i, In the logical idea ; 2, in nature ; and, 3, 
in mind. It is the same manifestation in different 
phases, and at different stages of the process. In 
the Logic the various succeeding categories of 
thought are all relative and progressively more 
adequate definitions of God. The logical Idea in its 
completed development may indeed be called but a 
phantom Deity. So may all theology. Both are 
but descriptions of the only reality, and yet both are 
revelations of this reality to our thinking. But this 
" unearthly ballet of bloodless categories " of the 
Logic freely goes forth from itself as nature * and 
becomes truly incarnate in man as Spirit, the cul- 
mination and the interpretation as well as the inter- 
preter of Nature. 

I have never read Hegel's Philosophie der Natur, 

* Cf. last paragraph of the Logic. 



The Vital Idea of Religion. 63 

the most severely critcised of all his works. The 
spirit is too adumbrated there for it to be thoroughly 
and congenially studied. But when he comes to the 
interpreter of nature, to the study of mind or spirit, 
he traces with glad heart and mind the very linea- 
ments of Him in whose image man is made. Novalis 
said that " Nature is a kind of illuminated table of 
contents of the spirit." Hegel would rather apply 
this to man. That which could only be spelled out 
with difficulty in nature he could read while running 
in the mind of man, and rise in rapid flight, rather 
than on stepping-stones into the world of intelli- 
gible reality. Nature is to be studied as the cradle 
of man, but his social and intellectual relations are 
more truly formative of him. And it is in the study 
of mind in these its own works — the state, art, and 
religion — that Hegel is peculiarily great and convin- 
cing. These are objective to man ; these are the work 
of the Spirit in different grades of its manifestation. 
The science of man is " writ large " in human his- 
tory, in man objective in all his institutions of family, 
states and church, in his systems of art, religion, 
and science. Humanity is man. But humanity, as a 
merely empirical existence, is not " the measure of 
the stature of the fullness " of perfect man. " Groan- 
ing and travailing," he yet lives and moves and has 
his being in God ; and the goal of all his history is 
union with God — resemblance to God. God is the 
beginning and the goal of man as spirit. Religion 
is the sphere of man's activity where the process 
toward this goal is a present, though progressively 
more adequately realized, enjoyment. Hence the 
Philosophy of Religion, or the thoughtful compre- 
hension of the mutual relations of man and God, as 



64 Philosophy of Religion. 

implicit in all religion and as fully revealed in the 
Christian religion, is of the highest and. most vital 
interest. 

A. Concerning God. 

In a philosophy of religion we can not begin with 
the full and scientifically adequate conception of God 
attained in philosophy. 

We have to begin with the conception of God 
which is present in the ordinary religious conscious- 
ness, and develop the presuppositions and conse- 
quences of this ordinary conception to the philosoph- 
ical one. 

We know God and that he is. We know that 
he is the creator of heaven and earth. We know 
and believe in our hearts that God is absolute Truth 
and absolute Being upon whom all else depends ; but 
this conception is comparatively abstract and unsci- 
entific. It is the object of the philosophy of religion 
not to merely explain it in its own terms and concep- 
tions, but in those of speculative thought. It is to 
translate the same content from the form of repre- 
sentation or figurate thought into the form of the 
idea * which holds all the elements of religion in ne- 
cessary and vital relation as a body does all its mem- 
bers. There is a reputed saying of Hegel, legendary 
for aught I know, yet essentially genuine, that think- 
ing is real worship — das Denken ist auch wahrer Got- 
tesdienst. This is as pregnant and practical as the 
classic " labor are est or are" and this is the divine serv- 
ice that Hegel proposes to render in his work on the 
Philosophy of Religion. In being thus related to 

* Cf. last part of Chapter II. 



The Vital Idea of Religion. 65 

God in thinking, man is as truly worshiping as if he 
were praying or laboring. 

To say that God is Absolute is not to unveil him 
to thought. When we add that he is the Absolute 
Substance and all else phenomenal and relative, we 
do not get further than the pantheism of Spinoza. It 
is not till we have seen him as Subject or Spirit that 
we know Him. Substance must be seen translating 
itself into Subject both in religion and in philosophy. 
But even this definition of God as Subject or Spirit 
may be held in the lifeless abstract way of deistic 
conception. It must be seen revealing, manifesting 
itself, as self-imparting love rather than as self-with- 
holding jealousy. This conception is directly given, 
externally revealed, in Christianity. Philosophy 
studies this religion in order to reach the same result, 
a last which is really first and concomitant in all 
thinking. 

But as religious we begin with this conception in 
us. But where in us is it? In what form of our 
subjective consciousness does this religious appre- 
hension of God as Spirit take place ? We ourselves 
as spirits are a complex of feeling, imagination, faith, 
and thought. In which form do we have this con- 
viction that God is Spirit? Where in us is God at 
home ? We say that he is omnipresent, but we final- 
ly determine that it is chiefly in thought that he ap- 
pears to us an Absolute ; and here absolute Substance 
precedes, in our apprehension of God, absolute Spirit. 
God is universal Substance, yet probably no religion 
or philosophy ever held the vulgar conception of 
pantheism which makes God to be simply the sum 
total of all things. The conception is rather of an 
unrelated nature or essence that endures forever, 



66 Philosophy of Religion, 

while all things else are but the most evanescent and 
contingent manifestations of some of the most remote 
of its attributes. Hence, Hegel says,* " Spinoza can 
be better termed an a-cosmist than an atheist." God 
as absolute substance is forever, while the world is 
not, except as the transient shadow of this reality. 

Spinozism may be termed the philosophy of ab- 
stract identity, having no essential characteristics or 
attributes. But the whole of philosophy is nothing 
but the study of the specific forms or characteristics 
of the to irdv (or rather, according to Hegel, of the 
6 eh). The philosophy of religion exhibits a series of 
increasingly adequate determinations of the essential 
attributes of God through substance up to spirit. 
This divine universal or spirit in uncharacterized 
form imparts himself to our consciousness, and re- 
ligion begins with God as an object of consciousness. 

B. The Religious Relation. 

Religion is itself a relation, a living and true con- 
nection of God and man. It is the work of philoso- 
phy to show the necessity of this religious relation. It 
must be seen to be not accidental and transient, the 
result of fear, priestcraft, or illusion, but a very ne- 
cessity of man as spirit to thus relate himself to God 
as well as essential on God's side to thus relate him- 
self to man. 

The necessity of religion, say some, needs no 
other proof than its universality ; but all men are not 
religious even if you include the lowest forms of su- 
perstition. Well, says another, its necessity is evi- 
dent from its being essential to the founding and 

* Hegel's Logic, p. 237: 



The Vital Idea of Religion. 6j 

maintaining of states and all forms of social life and 
morality. Plutarch is quoted as giving best expres- 
sion to this political necessity of having some re- 
ligion in every state. But no such merely external 
necessity or expediency can long maintain any re- 
ligion. It ceases to be useful as soon as it is ^een to 
be merely useful. Many radical socialists believe that 
it has thus been used to keep the poorer classes in 
subjection; that bills upon heaven have thus been ex- 
changed for the labor of the poor. Hence they urge 
the necessity of destroying all religion. Meantime 
their too often just iconoclasm springs itself from im- 
plicit religious feeling. Religion is necessary to the 
well-being of any society because it is intrinsically 
necessary, involved in the very nature of man, as pro- 
gressively realizing his manhood in the image of 
God. 

I. The Necessity of the Religious Standpoint. — Relig- 
ion is not merely instinctive, but is the result of a 
process of mediation. Beginning life with relation to 
finite things of time and sense, the human spirit forces 
itself above this point of view, and thinks of the 
great invisible beyond. Visible things are temporal, 
there must be an eternal ; our life is but a vapor, there 
must be everlasting substance. No mere process, 
from one finite thing to another larger one, satisfies 
this movement of the spirit. The most universal 
conception of a finite cosmos that can be framed by 
scientist or philosopher can not long arrest this ne- 
cessary movement of the spirit to the infinite and 
eternal, as the real ground of every cosmos. In noth- 
ing short of this can the spirit of man come to real 
self-consciousness. Epicurus and his modern follow- 
ers can give no larger conception than that of cosmos 



68 Philosophy of Religion. 

cycling back to chaos. It is in new form the old 
myth of Saturn creating and devouring his own 
children and then devouring himself. Modern sci- 
ence to-day, in its non-theistic form, is Saturn creat- 
ing. It may seem to be optimistic. But its logical 
creed ends in chaos whence it started, and pessimism 
is its last word. Schopenhauer and Von Hartmann 
are the real philosophers of all atheistic science. 
Every doctrine, every formula of the universe that 
does not rest on the idea of system-making Logos or 
Spirit, has implicitly chaos and pessimism at the core. 
But if its gods have gone away, they must return to 
save it from destruction. Religion is necessary even 
to science. The undevout astronomer is mad, and 
his music of the spheres will soon pass into wails of 
so many lost Pleiades, unless, like Kepler, he reads 
God's thoughts after Him. No mind to-day will 
stop with mere atoms. Some little of the Logos or 
system or thought is seen by all. Mere matter is no 
longer mindless matter. In the chaotic flux of sepa- 
rate atoms there is some relating, comparing, synthe- 
sizing power seen at work. Evolution is itself the 
partially revealed Logos, Ldea, Spirit, God. It is in- 
volved in matter and not the evolution of mere crass, 
mindless, world-stuff. The mind, in science, refuses 
to stop with the actuality of finite things. It neces- 
sarily rises to the point of view of their ideality, in 
which their actuality becomes a mere moment or 
constituent element. Actual things are separate and 
independent. Idealization sees them not only con- 
nected and related, but organically related — deprived 
of independent existence, depending upon each other 
and upon the whole for their being. Thus, the egg 
in its ideality is a chicken. Man is man, only as a 



The Vital Idea of Religion. 69 

member of the family, the state, and the church. In 
this process the finite, separate existence dies to self, 
to live a more realized self in the larger whole. Its 
reality is that of a moment, or a constituent element 
in the larger unity. It is abrogated, destroyed, and 
in the same process restored and enlarged. Such is 
the double significance of the favorite word aufge- 
hoben of Hegel. The act of consciousness affords the 
simplest illustration of this ideality. There are, at 
first, two separate things — the ego and the non-ego ; 
but consciousness grasps them both in its unity with- 
out destroying either. They both become constitu- 
ent elements of knowledge. Its larger illustration is 
seen in our apprehension of nature and spirit. They 
are different, and yet they are identical in their es- 
sence. Thus far much of the current agnosticism 
will go. It is intellectually forced to posit a com- 
mon substratum — a great unknown, one from which 
all spring and in which all are identical. This 
may be the formless substance of Spinoza, or the 
blank, cold, abstract absolute of Schelling. All have 
got beyond calling this substratum mere matter, 
and making mind a mere function of it. Matter has 
been spiritualized and defined ultimately as unknow- 
able force. This is the latest idol created. 

But beyond this subjective necessity which forces 
all thinkers to some substratum, in which nature and 
spirit are sublimated, it must be shown objectively 
that they sublimate themselves from mere finitude in 
the religious relation. Science itself rises clear out 
of materialism. In its categories of causality, force, 
order, law, mind casts phenomena into category after 
category of thought, including the higher ones reached 
by science, and still is forced on till that of self-con- 



jo Philosophy of Religion, 

scious spirit is reached as the ultimate. No finite or 
mechanical, chemical, or even vital relations of things 
are adequate to contain nature. Spirit alone is ulti- 
mately seen to be its causal and sustaining truth. 
This is the only vocation of nature — to be offered up as 
a burnt-offering, that out of it may spring forth Psyche. 
But such a Psyche is not, at first, a real spirit. In 
Nature spirit is, as it were, inebriate, or in a dream- 
life. Spirit is only implicit in nature, in man it 
comes to consciousness. At first it is as finite spirit. 
But we are forced by an irresfstible self-necessity to 
rise above all finite spirit, even above humanity — to 
spirit absolute and universal — in which all finite spirit 
lives and moves and has its being. Spirit finds itself 
in Nature, which at first sight seems to limit and en- 
slave. Man becomes the interpreter of it, and it be- 
comes his servant. He is also born into a limiting 
world of social relations. At first sight he may seem 
to be the passive creation and tool of heredity and of 
domestic, social, and national influences. But it is 
in and by means of these that he first finds himself * 
comes to himself, realizes himself. " They are an- 
other which is not another " — foreign, yet not hostile. 
Abstracted from them he is not truly man, but only 
an amputated fragment. All these relations are ne- 
cessary parts of the man himself. As he lives in 
them he realizes himself. iJThus it was that old Rome 
realized herself. Her god Terminus was elastic 
enough to include and transform all hostes into cives 
sui, and she became imperial mistress of the world. 
In its largest definition this limiting social environ- 
ment is what Hegel calls " the moral {sittliche) world " 
— the state. Citizen of no petty state, but of the 
world — cosmopolitan — is the highest point in which 



The Vital Idea of Religion. 71 

spirit, as finite, can find its freedom and realize itself. 
Spirit only lives and grows in this social medium. 
In it man finds his freedom, and lives a human, ra- 
tional, and spiritual life. Without this he would be 
a naked waif, a native Simeon Stylites, a nonentity. 
Unus homo, nullus homo. Without society no persons. 
Isolation impoverishes, society develops and enriches 
the individual. From the individualistic standpoint 
all social customs and institutions are limits to free- 
dom. Rousseau voiced this individualism in the 
eighteenth century. The savage is the only freeman. 
Carlyle fairly shouted it out on the transcendental 
key, while all the world wondered. But that phase 
is passed or passing. Egoism, individualism is seen 
to be morbid selfishness and self-destruction. We 
are bound on a voyage of discovery to find ourselves 
in everything foreign. All things are ours. Noth- 
ing human is longer alien to us. We love ourselves 
truly in loving others, thus loving ourselves into new 
and fuller life. The family, the state, art, religion, 
and philosophy are not only our clothing, but very 
bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh, and spirit of 
our spirit. No one has ever done as much as Hegel to 
emphasize and manifest this true freedom in bounds, 
the freedom of apparent necessity ; and to protest 
against the one-sided subjective freedom of sheer 
individualism. His ethics are entirely social. The 
Philosophy of the State (Philosophic des Rechts) is 
his only work on moral philosophy. He treats the 
family as the instinctive realization of the moral life ; 
and the state, in its larger sense, as the very con- 
summation of man as man. He restored the Greek 
ideal of the moral life — enlarged, enriched, and ful- 
filled by the Christian ideal. The upward impulse of 
8 



72 Philosophy of Religion. 

transcending spirit, its inherent necessity to pass be- 
yond the finite, will not stop short of the Christian 
ideal of man complete only in God. Social limitation 
after social limitation may be transformed into con- 
stituent elements of concrete freedom, even to the 
highest type of genuine humanitarianism — and yet the 
spirit wings its flight into the beyond. We approxi- 
mate more and more to our real, full life, without at- 
taining. The goal flies before us. The last words of 
Schiller's Pilgrim expresses this experience : 

Und das Dort ist niemals hier. 

Inadequacy is yet present with us. Necessity 
forces us on panting after "more life and fuller." 
Man is yet finite — only relatively complete in these 
social relations. Even in the highest form of human- 
ity, in universal history, the spirit groans after fuller 
life, only finding its goal in Spirit universal and abso- 
lute, in which all finite spirit exists. And it is here 
that Hegel finds the necessity of religion — the ne- 
cessity in man to transcend all that is finite and rela- 
tive, and to rise into communion with God. The 
beyond that must be the here is the world of Absolute 
Spirit. It is a present Spirit or Intelligence, mediat- 
ing itself to man through nature, art, religion, and 
philosophy. 

In art this relation of human to absolute Spirit 
appears in the form of sensuous perception, in philos- 
ophy in the form of thought, and in religion in the 
form of feeling and of representative or pictorial 
conception. This relation seems most immediate 
and real in religion. In it God is omnipresent, and 
nature and humanity are seen sub specie ceternitatis. 

But this necessity of religion, or of the religious 



The Vital Idea of Religion, 73 

point of view, is deducible not only from the world 
of finite nature and mind,* it is also deducible from 
the very idea of religion itself, proceeds necessarily 
from the all-embracing unity, is an essential element 
of the Divine Spirit itself. But this can only be seen 
after an examination of the religious consciousness. 

II. Forms of the Religious Consciousness, — Religion 
is never merely intellectual. Consciousness of God, 
or religious certitude, at first seems to be an immedi- 
ate relation between the soul and God. We are as 
sure of God as we are of our own selves. It is more 
true to say that in suppressing this consciousness of 
God we extinguish ourselves, than to say that in de- 
stroying ourselves we extinguish God. But perfect 
certitude of a thing does not prove its truth. We 
say that we believe, and do not know ; but faith is 
itself a kind of knowledge, often an implicit knowl- 
edge of the most fundamental and essential elements 
of our moral and intellectual nature. In this way it 
is equivalent to Reason. We believe, says Jacobi, 
that we have bodies ; we do not know it. We be- 
lieve that God exists ; we do not know it. We can 
fully sympathize with this reaction against the nega- 
tive results of Kant's criticism of the arguments for 
the existence of God. We can say with Jacobi that 
Philosophy can not give us God, freedom, or immor- 



* Prof. T. H. Green, in his Prolegomena to Ethics, has made this de- 
duction in most admh-able and philosophic form. The metaphysics of 
Nature as well as of man, mental and moral — that is, their implicit con- 
ditions, the total environment which their existence presupposes, that 
which is immanent in, back of and sustaining Nature and man — their 
only adequate metaphysics is that Eternal Spirit, or Self-consciousness, 
" with whom the human spirit is identical in the sense that he is all 
which the human spirit is capable of becoming." 



74 Philosophy of Religion. 

tality, if, like him, we restrict knowledge to .the 
sphere of the understanding, and regard Spinoza's as 
the only consistent scheme of Philosophy. Call it 
faith or reason, or what you will, the human Spirit is 
not thus impotent to rise beyond the finite, the neces- 
sitated, and the temporal. It will break out in forms 
of theosophy or mysticism, or zealous fanaticism — 
in some way it will protest against the limits placed 
to human vision by Kant, Hamilton, Mansel, and the 
" whole cloud of witnesses " that they may cite to 
prove their agnostic philosophy. The last and high- 
est consecration of all true religion must be an altar 
— ayvaxTTG) ©e« — to the unknown and unknowable 
God," says Hamilton. St. Paul says, " I know him 
whom I have believed." St. John says, " We know 
that we know him " ; and the world of thinkers as 
well as the world of plain, honest men holds with St. 
Paul and St. John. Innumerable expressions appar- 
ently the most contradictory might be adduced as to 
the relation between faith and knowledge, all which 
would need such sifting as we can not find place for 
here. It opens up the whole question between gnos- 
ticism and agnosticism — the most vital philosophic 
question of the day. Hegel's whole life-work was to 
maintain the power and worth of human cognition. 
With agnosticism he had less patience than with 
mysticism. The one utterly saps the vitality of 
thought, the other only floods it with more sap than 
it has channels prepared to receive. j The one denies 
that we can know any reality, and affirms that all 
that we can ever see is our own shadow ; that our 
knowledge is strictly conditioned to the prison walls 
of our own senses, and conceptions, and ideas. We 
know less of realities than Plato's cave-men. Hegel 



The Vital Idea of Religion. 75 

maintained the validity of human knowledge ; that 
our faculties give us truth ; that there is a genuine 
kinship between thought and being ; and that, wing 
our flight where we may in the universe, we shall 
always find ourselves at home, because we shall al- 
ways find intelligence everywhere. But Hegel has 
been accused of such gnosticism as would imply his 
own personal omniscience. Because he maintains 
the validity of our thought, and the ultimate identity 
of perfect thought and being ; because he refuses to 
believe in a Ding an sick God who always plays hide- 
and-seek in vain with children made in his own im- 
age, he has been most foolishly, and sometimes even 
savagely, denounced as impious. But the thinker 
who maintains such gnosticism as belongs only to 
the piercing eyes of God has never yet been admitted 
to the circle of philosophic thinkers. Hegel un- 
doubtedly uses expressions as to the comprehension 
of thought that might, though only arbitrarily, be 
interpreted as the height of human arrogance. Per- 
fect knowledge of a perfect world — no ! he did not 
make this insane claim for human thought ; but he 
did claim the power of human thought to know re- 
ality. He did maintain that thought is the ultimate 
reality, that thought is things, and things are thought ; 
that God is the highest Thought, and that we can 
know him through thought. Prof. T. H. Green re- 
alized the criticism which Hegel's Absolute Idealism 
is exposed to. Holding to absolute Idealism himself, 
maintaining that there is nothing intrinsically un- 
knowable to us in the universe or in God himself, 
he yet thinks that Hegel often states his philosophy 
in a form that affronts the common-sense conviction 
of reality. Thus, he says that, while God is in us, 



76 Philosophy of Religion. 

is our self, we are so conditioned that we can not 
grasp the whole as God sees it. Language which 
seems to imply such identification of our thought 
with God, or with the world of spiritual reality, can 
lead to nothing but confusion. But he adds this ap- 
preciative criticism : " That there is one spiritual 
self-conscious Being, of which all that is real is the 
activity or expression ; that we are related to this 
spiritual Being, not merely as parts of the world 
which is its expression, but as partakers in some in- 
choate measure of the self -consciousness through 
which it at once constitutes and distinguishes itself 
from the world ; that this participation is the source 
of morality and religion ; this we take to be the vital 
truth which Hegel had to teach." * He says further 
in regard to Hegel's philosophy : " It may be doubted 
whether it has thoroughly satisfied even those among 
us who regard it as the last word of philosophy ; 
yet, when we think out the problem left by previous 
inquirers, we find ourselves led to it by an intellectual 
necessity." 

It is because our experience is a member or ele- 
ment of a living, organic totality that we may read 
in it the principle and nature of the whole. This may 
be in the form of faith, or " abbreviated knowledge," 
or the apprehension of the essential principle, while 
" knowledge " may be restricted to the expansion, to 
the worked-out details, relations, and applications. 
There is no complete, mechanical separation between 
human and divine intelligence, but the most congenial, 
consubstantial connection. Now " I know," though 
only in part. When my union with the Divine Spirit 

* Works of T. H. Green, vol. iii, p. 146. 



The Vital Idea of Religion. yj 

becomes perfect, " then shall I know even also as I 
am known." More than something like this I can not 
possibly attribute to Hegel ; less than this I should 
wish no one to believe. 

Religion on its phenomenal side certainly does 
not start with knowledge in any technical sense of 
the word, yet its most subjective form is not devoid 
of some element of intelligence. The one who has 
God in the form of feeling or of pictorial conceptions 
is yet a knowing, thinking man ; and man is not such 
a bundle of side-by-side faculties as the old abstract 
psychology affirmed. Feeling, and willing, and know- 
ing are in reciprocal and organic union in man. The 
self-conscious Ego, the intelligent subject is present 
in and through them all, distinguishing man's desires 
and feelings from those of mere animals. Thus, in 
examining the nature of the religious consciousness, 
or in tracing the elevation of the human spirit from 
earth to heaven, from self to God, we find three 
closely interrelated forms — feeling, representation, and 
thought — which are the forms of the ascending spiral. 

i. The most immediate form in which the certi- 
tude of God appears is that of emotion or feeling. 
Thus it is said that we know God immediately, in- 
tuitively, in the heart ; that our feeling, rather than 
our reason, is the ground of our certitude. 

Take first the assertion that we know God only 
intuitively. It is the word only that renders the 
statement false. This intuitionism is often the creed 
of despair in philosophy as well as in religion. The 
criticism of the understanding has destroyed the fair 
unity of our religious, ethical, and philiosophical con- 
ceptions. Our old gods are apparently slain, yet we 
can not but believe them still living. Granted that 



J& Philosophy of Religion, 

we can not prove, but rather destroy proof of them 
by reasoning, then we have this last resort, to deny 
the jurisdiction of reason in these provinces. We 
have " innate ideas," " intuitive principles of moral- 
ity," "immediate knowledge of God." We do not 
find God at the end of any syllogism. Nor do the best 
instruments of science find him for us in Nature. The 
absolute infallibility of the Bible and Church has been 
rudely shattered, and yet we do have absolute and 
immediate religious certitude. God is nearer us 
than even we ourselves are. The noisy chatter of 
the critical schools, the logomachies of theologians 
and philosophers, the agnosticism of science, make 
us martyrs of both despair and disgust. We soar 
above them all to the mount of transfiguration, 
where God and spiritual realities warm us into the 
spirit of rapt devotion, and give us that absolute 
conviction that is essential to our very being. How 
often has the reasoning of the friends as well as of 
the foes of Christianity thus driven the best spirits to 
claim higher, firmer grounds of faith in intuition. Ja- 
cobi's faith, Neander's Pectus est quod theologium facit, 
the oversoul of the transcendentalists, and the unut- 
terable vision of saints and mystics, all are valid wit- 
nesses at least against the adequacy and the jurisdic- 
tion of the mere understanding in the apprehension of 
spiritual realities. Take the so-called " Evidences of 
Christianity" of the eighteenth century, and who does 
not sympathize with Coleridge when he exclaims 
against such evidences — " Evidences of Christianity, I 
am weary of the word ! " The eighteenth century 
was pre-eminently rationalistic. The supremacy of 
reason was acknowledged by all. It was proposed 
to defend Christianity by proving its reasonableness. 



The Vital Idea of Religion. 79 

One should only believe what he can prove. And 
so the manufacture of reasons for believing Chris- 
tianity went on till but few of the manufacturers or 
their customers had any vital faith left, and the Evan- 
gelical school and Methodism, with all their lack of 
reason and abundance of feeling, brought about a 
real revival of religion. The more Christianity was 
proved, the less it was believed. Who cares for a 
revival of another such " age of reason " ? Who 
longs for a return of such rational evidences of the 
faith ? What faith can be vital that is grounded on 
such intellectual evidences? Such reasoning was 
most subjective, mechanical, artificial, sophistical, 
and at the highest merely logical. Reason meant the 
understanding, conditioned by sense, and not the vital 
reason that sees the whole complex of man's being 
and environment, and takes true and comprehensive 
views of them. The " age of reason " would better 
be styled the age of " reasons," of any and of all 
kinds of arguments pro and con. A new objection 
to Christianity was sprung by some pre-Huxley free 
lance, and the defenders of the faith said, " Well, now, 
that is a pretty hard blow, and we must consider 
how we can weaken its effect " — that is, give some 
accidental, special-pleading reasoning, paying him 
back in his own coin. Such reasoning is almost 
sure to become sophistry and lead to inventing 
evidences where there are none, and of telling lies 
for God. Some ground or reason may be given for 
everything under the heavens. But, as Hegel says, 
" To be confined within the range of mere grounds, 
is the principle and position of the Sophists." * They 

* Hegel's Logic, p. 196. 



80 Philosophy of Religion, 

►"' 

brought forward various points of view or grounds, 
or reasons, without confessing that these grounds 
were themselves ungrounded or without necessary 
content. Such grounds are always as available and 
as numerous for attack as for defense. " In a time," 
he adds, " so rich in reflection and so devoted to 
ratiocination as our own, he must be a -poor creature 
who can not advance a good ground for every- 
thing, even for the worst and most depraved." In 
speaking of the attempt made to esteem the so- 
called proofs of God's existence as the only means 
of producing faith in God, he says : " Such a doctrine 
would find its parallel, if we said that eating was 
impossible before we had acquired a knowledge of 
the chemical, botanical, and zoological qualities of 
our food ; and that we must delay digestion till we 
had finished the study of anatomy and physiology." * 
This would be nonsense, and yet these sciences about 
food and digestion are a necessity for thinking man. 
To eat is not the whole of life. Intellectual compre- 
hension of the process is worth something. And to 
have immediate certitude and enjoyment of religious 
truth can not be ultimate for the thoughtful worship- 
er. It is not merely reflective, analytical thinking, 
but also comprehensive, synthetic, speculative think- 
ing that is a necessity of our nature. In the pro- 
found maxim of Anselm, credo ut intelligam y the ut 
intelligam is recognized to be a necessity of his na- 
ture as well as the credo. So, too, with his saying, 
fides qucerit intellectum. 

But whatever be the reasons for this claim of im- 
mediate intuitive knowledge of God, and however 

* Hegel's Logic, p. 3. 



The Vital Idea of Religion. 81 

much we sympathize with the attitude of those mak- 
ing it, we must not forbear to examine more closely 
the assertion. 

What is it to know? Knowledge in its lowest 
terms implies at least a self and an object — that is, 
we know God as an object of consciousness with- 
out knowing how or what He is. We know Him 
intuitively as the absolute Being. But if this is all 
that we know, it is, as Hegel says, not worth the 
knowing, for of all the categories of thought that of 
mere undefined Being is the emptiest and most sterile. 
Such being is mere being, negative being, nothing.* 
" Being is the same as nothing." This is one of the 
celebrated paradoxes of Hegel, meaning that if every 
characteristic, attribute, and quality is abstracted, 
there remains only the blank, indefinable identity of 
mere being which is thus indistinguishable from noth- 
ing. " No great amount of wit," he says, " is needed 
to throw ridicule on this maxim." His only interest 
is to show what an utterly barren and inadequate 
definition being is to give to God. 

But, granted this intuition of the Being of God, it 
remains our own. The being of God is an object 
within our own consciousness. We distinguish be- 
tween the two elements, but can only do so by as- 
serting being of only one of them. It is my con- 
sciousness. I am, have being, therefore the other, 
God, is not, except as part of me. I take the being to 
myself. I can doubt everything except my own be- 
ing, for in doubting I am the doubter and the doubt 
itself, and so doubt flees away and leaves pure, real 
being only in me. This is a reduction of intuitional- 

* Cf. Hegel's Logic, p. 137. 



82 Philosophy of Religion, 

ism to subjective idealism, the basis of most agnosti- 
cism. Feuerbach, the left-wing Hegelian, applied 
this subjective view to theology in his Essence of 
Christianity (translated by George Eliot). God is 
simply the reflection or objectification of the indi- 
vidual within his own mind. Theology is but objecti- 
fied anthropology. A figure of speech, personifica- 
tion, accounts for it all. Max Stirner produced the 
reductio ad absurdum of this subjectivism in " The Indi- 
vidual and his Possession," in which absolute anarchic 
individualism is proclaimed. Thus the dialectic forces 
this form of knowing God to a denial of his real ex- 
istence, to Kant's position that we can never know 
any but our own mental states and ideas. If God is 
still to be held, there must be found a place within 
the me, where he really exists, inseparable from my 
being. We have then the second form of immediate 
knowledge of God. God is in me in feeling or Senti- 
ment (Gefuhl). In feeling God within me I have the 
most absolute certitude of his existence. Vainly I 
seek him in the intellect; I only find him in my 
heart. Intellect separates, feeling unites. 

While fully granting a measure of truth to this 
position, we must say that it is false when held so as 
to exclude all activity of thought. Thinking man can 
have no doors within himself locked against this ac- 
tivity. He thinks all over, even in the deep recesses 
of the heart. 

To feel anything implies at least some distinction 
between the one who feels and the object felt. In the 
religious relation this object is so universal and abso- 
lute as to almost extinguish the subject. We are 
emptied that he may fill us. We easily recall the 
most extravagant terms in which saints and mystics 



The Vital Idea of Religion. 83 

have expressed this total self-effacement under the 
felt presence of God. 

Faith passes into contemplative love, and this into 
ecstatic bliss. 

But it may also take the form of abject fear. We 
are naught, vile earth, worms of the dust, in the pres- 
ence of the Almighty. All that is left of us is mere 
fear, passing into repentance, and, it may be, into 
love and peace. 

We ought thus to feel God ; but mere feeling of 
anything is no proof of the worth of the feeling. 
Within the sphere of feeling we have the most varied 
content, and some discriminating power is needed to 
specify what feeling is strictly religious, and some 
standard of excellence by which to grade all feelings 
that we have. The loveliest flowers and the most 
noxious weeds alike spring up within the heart. To 
feel a thing does not vindicate its goodness or worth. 
How do we distinguish between the feeling of right 
and wrong, of love and hatred, of God and the devil ? 
Not by mere feeling, but by an intelligent, rational 
insight into the real worth of these objects felt. The 
pleasures of the sensualist are felt as much as the 
raptures of the saint, and mere feeling vindicates 
the one as well as the other. Without some criterion 
outside of feeling, then, we are left with the maxim, 
De gustibus non disputandmn, or do what gives you the 
most pleasurable feeling. Feeling depends upon the 
temperament and idiosyncrasies of the individual. 
We may say to a friend, " You ought to feel this" and 
he returns the irrefutable answer, " I am so constituted 
that I can not." Again, we may feel merely fantastic 
creations of the imagination. We may be moved 
with pictures of ourselves as noble, heroic, holy souls, 
9 



84 Philosophy of Religion, 

with hopes and fears that may be utterly groundless. 
Feeling is thus the worst form of subjectivism. Ani- 
mals, too, feel, but they do not have religion because 
they do not think. 

But this view may be expressed in a higher form. 
We have God in our hearts. Heart means more than 
mere temporary accidental feeling. It is the abiding 
center or core of our life. It is our character. But 
the Bible expressly ascribes evil as such to the heart. 
Selfishness, anger, wrath, malice, fill the hearts of 
many. Only the intelligent man can say in his heart, 
" There is a God." " The foolish body " denies it. 
The heart needs to be kept " with all diligence," to be 
changed, regenerated, according to the form of some 
intelligent good. Again, the most cultured intelli- 
gence does not exclude feeling, but rather nourishes 
and elevates it. True religion is in the heart. Pec- 
toral theology is the vital theology ; but feelings are 
not self-kindled, the heart is not self-moved. Objects 
of love create love, and objects of enmity create 
hatred. They alone who know God aright will love 
him aright. They who do not know him aright 
may have the most intense religious feeling. The 
most degraded idolater can appeal to his heart as 
proof of his religion. To distinguish between true 
and false religion we must appeal to intelligence. It 
is the intelligent heart that knows God and the in- 
telligent will that obeys him. 

Thought, too, must come to discriminate between 
myself and the object felt in my heart. Thought 
must come to make God a free, intelligent, external 
object. Thinking our way out of mere feeling, we 
come to know God as he is and as worthy of adora- 
tion. Our religious feeling is seen to rest on that 



The Vital Idea of Religion. 85 

which certifies to its value as distinguished from other 
kinds and grades of feeling. Thus, knowledge enters 
as an element of religion. Thought is seen to be the 
vindication of the religion of the heart. Religion 
must be felt, must be in the heart, but it must be in- 
telligible feeling. Hegel does not deny the necessary 
and continuous element of feeling in religion. In 
fact, he maintains that it is essential to any truth be- 
ing ours, that it be in our feeling, in our heart. He 
only contends against that form of faith that appeals 
to feeling as its sufficient ground, and maintains 
that it is the function of thought to justify good and 
true feelings and to condemn evil feelings. 

But there are various forms of knowledge. There 
is knowledge coming through the senses ; there is 
knowledge of the logical understanding which in 
theology defines the whole content of religion in 
definite, dogmatic propositions ; there is knowledge 
gained through scientific induction which has much 
to tell us about the great part of human experience 
that is constituted by religion ; there is, finally, knowl- 
edge in the form of the comprehension of the organic 
unity of all parts of the totality of experience, the 
necessary self - relation of all elements in a living 
whole. In which form of knowledge is religion to 
be found ? In all of these, we may say. Yet it is 
only the last, that of speculative thought, that gives 
us our indiscerptible grip on God and absolutely vin- 
dicates the religious relation manifested in the' less 
adequate forms of art, of imagination, of inductive 
and logical knowledge. But, as elsewhere, this true 
first is chronologically the last. The speculative 
comprehension of the religious relation never comes 
to many men, and comes to others only late in life. 



86 Philosophy of Religion. 

Hegel is never tired of asserting that religion and 
philosophy have the same content, only differing in 
form of knowing it. Philosophy tries to comprehend 
that which religion is. The philosophic content of 
religion is comprehension in a living system of the 
" abbreviated knowledge " of faith. As such it is the 
highest form of theology ; but both theology and 
philosophy are only the religion of the few, while re- 
ligion is both the theology and the philosophy of the 
many. With the many, religion lingers in the form 
of representative or metaphorical conceptions. The 
thought of God is the soul of the religion of the 
heart. It is also the soul of religion expressed or in- 
terpreted in language of metaphor and general con- 
cepts. But, before passing to this most general form 
of religious knowledge, Hegel devotes a section to a 
more primary form, in which man objectifies the ab- 
solute — that is, the form of art, the creation of sensu- 
ous intuition or perception. 

2. Sensuous perception is the direct apprehension 
of an object under the external conditions of time 
and space. Material things here represent as sym- 
bols the subjective object of devotion in the heart. 
It may thus be called external representation or sym- 
bolism. In its highest form it constitutes the realm 
of the Beautiful and its forms of Art. Art, Religion, 
and Philosophy may be said to be the three forms in 
which the Absolute exists for man. Sensuous percep- 
tion or external representation is the organ of this 
knowledge in art, representative conception in re- 
ligion, and speculative comprehension that of philos- 
ophy. 

It will not do to cover the lower forms of idolatry 
with the beautiful veil of art. Yet, in the lowest 



The Vital Idea of Religion. 8j 

form, the heathen sees in his images, or in his stock 
or stone, a representation of something higher and 
invisible. Natural objects were at first images of 
non-natural powers. Art, undoubtedly, sprang out 
of idolatry, as astronomy out of astrology. In art, 
the human spirit labors to manifest the absolute in 
visible form as the Beautiful — to portray the Divine 
to eye and ear. The Divine is really the center and 
heart of all Art. Hence its ultimate relation with 
religion. It is, in fact, an essential phase of religion. 
But when made the chief phase of religion it be- 
comes false — relapses into idolatry. It reached its 
highest form among the Greeks. Their religion was 
the religion of the Beautiful. Hegel barely notes 
this phase of religion here. For fuller treatment of 
it we may refer to his ^Esthetics.* 

Religion for us, however, finds expression rather 
in what we may call mental art. Mental conceptions 
take the place of objective nature and forms of art, 
in our representation of the Divine. Sensuous per- 
ception is ideally transformed into pictorial mental 
conception and generalized definitions. Methinks I 
see God — where ? In my mind's eye, says the relig- 
ious Hamlet. The passage has been made from sense 
to thought. The whole process of name-giving is 
the work of this phase of thought. The first Adam 
had made this passage, and could therefore respond 
to God's request that he should give a name to every 
beast and bird. The plural " we " is a primary men- 
tal generalization of two different sensuous persons. 
They are grasped together into one mental con- 



* Hegel's ^Esthetics : A Critical Exposition, by J. Steinforth Kedney, 
D. D. ; Griggs & Co., Chicago. 



88 Philosophy of Religion. 

cept. All our most general and abstract terms — law, 
force, order, substance, essence, being, even that of 
God — are the result of this work of thought. Sensu- 
ous things are thus immersed and regenerated in 
this mental process. But there is a tendency to re- 
vert to their material equivalent. Used as symbols 
to represent more than any complex of sense could 
give, and as symbols of more than themselves actu- 
ally present, they are sometimes personified and thus 
accepted as the exact equivalent of what they were 
intended to represent in a metaphorical way. Meta- 
phors are thus objectified. In this phase it resembles 
the lowest form of art. It is mental idolatry. In- 
stead of objectifying in sensuous forms, it accepts its 
definite mental pictures as the very incarnation of 
the absolute. A representation ( Vorstellung) * is a gen- 
eralized picture introducing an object to the mental 
eye. It is a device of thought to get above sense. 
It works these conceptions partly out of sense and 
partly out of materials emanating from self-conscious 
thought.f Sometimes they are the very images of 
real thought, and yet only formally so, for they 
never get beyond the limits of the understanding. 
The timeless and invisible are envisaged under con- 
ceptions valid only for temporal and sensible objects. 
Besides, these conceptions are independent, and can 
only be externally connected. 

This picture-thinking, as Hegel styles it, forms 
the bulk of that done by the mass of mankind. But 
it is only proximate and inexact. The work of phi- 
losophy is needed to transform such conceptual think- 
ing into organic thought. Conceptions, like works 

* Cf. last part of Chapter II. f Hegel's Logic, p. 31. 



The Vital Idea of Religion. 89 

of art, " half conceal and half reveal." These mental 
images may at one time help to wing the flight of 
the soul heavenward if used as helps, or they may 
chain it down to earth, if metaphor is literalized. 

3. Representation. — The religious consciousness 
finds spontaneous and helpful expression in this 
language of conceptions and metaphors. It is pecul- 
iarly the language of religion. But it may become 
a hindrance and a limit to the true expression of 
religion as well as a help. Admit its worth, but 
scan its inadequacy and misuse. A pictorial con- 
ception may mislead as well as a sensuous picture. 
Men may be so blinded that they will fight and die 
for abstract and inadequate conceptions, as a hea- 
then will for his gods of wood and stone. John 
Wesley wrote to the Calvinist Toplady, " Your God 
is my devil." Yet each of them would have en- 
dured the pains of martyrdom to maintain his own 
conception of God. 

We must note more closely some of the uses and 
abuses of this form of thinking in interpreting the 
religious consciousness. 

From the cradle to the grave our religious life is 
nourished and strengthened by metaphors. The 
soul's loftiest flights are winged by metaphor. The 
world of sense and imagination are gleaned for 
choicest imagery to express the invisible and the 
spiritual. The language of the Bible and of devo- 
tional literature of all ages is essentially anthropo- 
morphic, but only as metaphor. The cold critic may 
challenge the religion because of its language. He 
may caricature the common Christian conception of 
God as that of a " non-natural magnified man, living 
just around the corner." He literalizes where they 



90 Philosophy of Religion. ' 

spiritualize. And yet even the devout soul often 
literalizes. Winged as it is by metaphor, it is often 
chained to metaphor. It accepts metaphors as equiv- 
alents, instead of symbols, of spiritual truth. But as 
new experience comes, the spirit waxes strong- enough 
to break through the letter that chaineth. The in- 
adequacy of its former conceptions being realized, 
there comes a state of mental unrest. The mind is 
continually battling with inadequate, worn-out con- 
ceptions, and emancipating itself from the temporal 
and finite elements in its conceptions of the Infinite. 
It recognizes not only the contradiction between its 
imaginative conceptions and the absolute and infinite 
nature of its object, but also the contradictions of 
its conceptions among themselves. As the artist 
realizes that his creations are inadequate representa- 
tions of the ideal, so do religious people recognize 
that their conceptions of the invisible and spiritual 
are inadequate ; and whife using this figurate, meta- 
phorical language, they tacitly assert that it is merely 
figurative. The form is not equal to its content. It 
only suggests and embodies the content in such a 
way as to enable them to immeasurably transcend it. 
Thus we speak of the Father and the Son in the 
Trinity, tacitly denying that we affirm their relations 
to each other to be the same as the relation of a hu- 
man father and son to each other. We affirm only a 
likeness, a similarity to the human relation that helps 
us better to express the true nature of God. So, too, 
when we speak of the wrath of God, his vengeance, 
his throne, his right hand, and his holy arm, we rec- 
ognize that they are only inadequate figures. The 
Scriptural expression, " The fruit of the tree of knowl- 
edge of good and evil," contains intellectual and moral 



The Vital Idea of Religion. 91 

elements, which submerge, and force us to rise above 
its sensuous element of tree and fruit. So it is that 
very many of our anthropomorphic conceptions of 
God are used and not abused. Dwelling on them as 
metaphors and parables, they suggest and awaken 
the highest spiritual communion with God, while at 
the same time they are not accepted as exact equiva- 
lents for the spiritual realities they thus suggest. 

How best to conceive God to-day under the 
changed conditions of modern science and culture is 
the chief task of religious teachers and apologists. 
How to discard antique and effete conceptions (mis- 
representations of our religious truth that create the 
skeptic, and give him a man of straw, or quixotic 
windmills to do battle with) and to replace them with 
new, vital, and more adequate ones — this is a work 
not to be declined by earnest and intelligent Christians 
to-day. Our own self-necessitated iconoclasm has de- 
stroyed our old idols ; can not, must we not, make 
new and better ones ? A divine revelation must 
come and be interpreted under these limitations of 
human mind and language, or it would be as un- 
meaning as the equation of two unknown quantities 
x=y. But the experience and content of the hu- 
man mind varies — advances, we believe — and so the 
materials out of which it must frame its conceptions 
varies and increases. Are we to be equal to this task 
laid upon us by the Zeit-Geist of the present century, 
as our fathers of other centuries have been equal to 
their task ? This is not the highest sort of vindica- 
tion that thought has to make of religion — not the 
absolute vindication that the philosophy of Religion 
offers ; but it is, nevertheless, a very lofty one that 
may well engage the sanctified intellect of those 



92 Philosophy of Religion, 

who have to speak to the people through pulpit and 
press to-day. 

Not only do these pictorial conceptions help us to 
rise far beyond themselves, but also external facts of 
history serve the same purpose, though they may 
also, like abused conceptions, smother the idea in 
names and dates and external events. But almost 
none are too stupid to draw a moral from history. 
They read between the lines, and interpret merely ex- 
ternal events. Some plan, idea, providence, or spir- 
itual interpretation is thus given to all history. This 
may often be far below a philosophy of History ', but it 
at least shows the tentative efforts of the ordinary 
consciousness toward the comprehension of the spir- 
itual import of mere events. The events of the life 
of Jesus are genuine divine history ; but as mere facts 
they are of the same value as other historical events. 
Yet they have an inner and spiritual content that 
only reason can see and interpret. Divine activity, 
eternal transactions, and absolute divine relations are 
manifested in the sensuous, finite events that form 
the external history of Jesus Christ. The content is 
infinite, the form only finite. Faith, spirit, thought, 
it is, which sees the infinite content. Spirit testifies 
to spirit, and the son of man recognizes the Son of 
God in Jesus of Nazareth. 

" The history of Christ's life is thus the external 
evidence, but faith changes its signification ; for the 
important point is not merely faith as a belief in this 
external history, but in the doctrine that this man 
was the Son of God. There the sensuous content 
becomes quite a different one ; it is changed into an- 
other, and the demand or postulate is that it should 
be proved by evidence. The subject is changed 



The Vital Idea of Religion. 93 

completely ; from a sensuously, empirically existing 
subject it becomes a divine one — an essentially high- 
est phase of God himself. This content is no longer 
sensuous; when, therefore, the demand is made to 
prove it in the former sensuous manner, this mode is 
inadequate, to begin with, since the subject is of an 
entirely different nature." * 

Spiritual truth comes to all primarily in this form 
of representative knowledge. It is translated out of 
the form of feeling, which it has largely created, and 
given some definite characteristics and attributes. 
The genesis of the religious feeling, it is true, belongs 
to the primitive depths in which God and the soul 
are practically one. The child has the native capacity 
for religion. Religious training would be in vain 
without this presupposition. To give the child any 
conceptions, any symbols, names, or attributes of God 
is to meet the essential religious wants of his nature, 
by helping him to positive conceptions of what he 
feels blindly stirring within his soul. 

Hegel notes the pedagogical question as to whether 
or not religion can be taught. He holds the induc- 
tion of children into objective forms of worship and 
faith to be essential to their religious development. 
Religious training is as essential as any other part of 
education. He would approve of the catechetical 
method, which is followed in all the public schools 
of Germany to-day. So bare a skeleton as Sadler's 
" Church Doctrine and Bible Teaching " is a positive 
help at this stage, as it is a positive hindrance when 
its abstract, dogmatic, literalized imagery is given as 
meat to strong men. But it is just in this pictorial, 

* Philosophic der Religion, vol. ii, p. 323. 



94 Philosophy of Religion, 

anthropomorphic form that religion can be taught. 
It is educed and nourished by such definite concep- 
tions. The love of God is depicted as the love of 
a parent for a child, only infinitely greater, and his 
anger likewise. The conception of almightiness may 
be made the beginning of wisdom and love as well as 
of obedience. Faith lays hold of all these concep- 
tual attributes, and raises the believer into closer 
communion with God. Fear is changed into confi- 
dence. God is not a hostile but a friendly power. 
We are only complete in Him as we identify our- 
selves with Him. Any poor earth-born mortal with 
God on his side is always the majority — is on the side 
of the biggest guns which triumph over all foes. 
This was one of the points of difference in the bitter 
disagreement between Hegel and Schleiermacher. 
Hegel made the feeling of nothingness and of sheer 
dependence a lower and transient phase of religion, 
while Schleiermacher maintained that it always con- 
stituted true religion. He maintained that the Church 
at the Reformation rightly apprehended and restored 
the central doctrine of justification by faith. Through 
faith one is so united with God that he has absolute 
assurance of salvation, and absolute freedom in his 
spiritual life. God's laws are seen to be the laws of 
his own true being. God is for him, and he will not 
fear what the devil or man worketh against him. It 
is the testimony of the Spirit that authenticates re- 
ligious truth. The positive catechetical stage must 
be so conducted as to lead to personal conviction. 
But this comes only through mediation. At first 
truth is received as "Church doctrine and Bible 
teaching." Thus the incarnation — the very core of 
revealed or absolute religion — is received naively on 



The Vital Idea of Religion. 95 

authority. It is the same with other doctrines. But 
thought unavoidably comes to reflect upon these 
doctrines, to criticise and examine them in their picto- 
rial and dogmatic form. Their limitations and con- 
tradictions then appear. Doubt comes to shake the 
whole fabric of man's creed. Certitude is then 
sought through rationalistic investigations and evi- 
dences, only to multiply doubts. Then recourse is 
had to the belief of the majority. The quod semper 
maxim is appealed to. Thousands and millions of 
the wisest and best men have believed thus, oecumen- 
ical councils have thus decreed the creed ; therefore 
it must be true. Thus, faith ceases to be living and 
personal. The superstition of pagan oracles appears 
in the form of absolute and unsubstantiated infalli- 
bility of council and Church. 

I am free to admit that, so long as religious 
thought tarries in this realm of figurate concep- 
tions and definitions, and demands absolute infallible 
certitude of such conceptions, there can be no other 
one offered than this same doctrine of ecclesiastical 
infallibility. All the so-called evidences of Chris- 
tianity that try to meet rationalism on its own low 
plane can attain to nothing more than probability 
or credibility. Put "old faiths in new light" and 
old foes will appear with new faces. Restate doc- 
trines ; reconceive them in harmony with the changed 
conditions of modern science and culture ; disinte- 
grate and reintegrate the Creed with the evolution- 
ary hypothesis ; reform the Reformation ; let the 
new Theology and the new Reformation replace effete 
conceptions by modern and more adequate ones ; let 
science and religion find a modern reconciliation of 

concepts, and still no permanent certitude will be 
10 



96 Philosophy of Religion. 

reached. All this work, as I have said (page 91), is 
very valuable, and none of us who are in earnest 
about helping our fellow-men can do otherwise than 
heartily engage in translating out of the old into 
new conceptions. But we are still in the realm of 
inadequate forms and language, which our thought 
will never cease to criticise. So one must let 
thought have its perfect work, and reach its ulti- 
mate comprehension of the religious idea and rela- 
tion in which the absolute rationality of Christian 
doctrine is vindicated, or else he must, if still haunted 
by the phantom of infallibility of conceptions, fall 
back on sheer authority.* Thought must transcend 
the conceptions of both common rationalism and 
common orthodoxy, before the faith can have that 
vital, personal, intellectual vindication of which any 
ex cathedra infallibility is the veriest ape. Either this 
Philosophy of Religion must be attained, or we must 
rest on the external evidences of miracle and coun- 
cils. The only other alternative is to refuse to ex- 
amine, to ask for no evidences, to keep the simple 
faith of childhood in mature years by arbitrary re- 
pression of thought. 

Apologetics may seem to advance independently. 
Yet its work is constantly that of an interplay of 
thought and conceptions and reasonings, and author- 
ity, with authority as the ultimate place of refuge. 
Common rationalism will then ask for the authority 
of ex cathedra authority, for the credentials of infalli- 
bility. The appeal is to miracles. But they are not 
evidences of our own senses. We were not present 

* The worth and the worthlessness of this notion of infallibility are 
admirably considered by the Rev. Dr. Kedney, in his Christian Doctrines 
Harmonized, vol. ii, p. 242. 



The Vital Idea of Religion. 97 

when the revelation was thus confirmed. We must 
accept the testimony of eye-witnesses. That the 
apostles were eye-witnesses we must ultimately be- 
lieve, because the Church says they were. Then 
rationalism smiles at the credulity of believers in 
miracles. Modern science seems, at least, to render 
their occurrence utterly improbable. The newer 
criticism plays havoc with the verbally inspired Bible 
of the orthodox. The new method of historical 
study reveals the human element as dominant in all 
church history, robbing all councils of the ecclesias- 
tical gloss of infallibility. LThe Bible, Reason, and 
the Church, one after another, are made the stand- 
ing-ground of Apologetics, and yet not one of them 
is infallible. Each one needs a larger apologetic to 
vindicate its authority. They are all relatively suf- 
ficient grounds, when themselves grounded upon the 
authority of the absolute idea of ReligionT I am the 
last one to depreciate their relative value. I am 
convinced that modern Apologetics must largely deal 
with these methods, and that it makes no mistake in 
its appeal to the Bible, to Reason, and to the Church 
as authorities. I am the last one to abate anything 
from the just deliverances of the Christian conscious- 
ness as embodied in these three forms of authority. 
But I do not believe that any or all of them can 
absolutely vindicate our deepest religious verities, 
much less the temporary and imperfect conceptions 
in which these verities are often couched. None of 
them can afford us a " short and easy method with 
skeptics." The Bible is infallible. The argument 
is, u Believe or be damned." The nineteenth century 
shrugs its shoulder into at least an interrogation- 
mark. Reason is infallible. The argument is, at least, 



98 Philosophy of Religion, 

" Believe this or nothing." The agnostic chooses 
the latter alternative. Then comes the hard-church 
argument, affirming the right of might, of mere pos- 
session. The Church is infallible. Its assertion — for 
it proffers no argument — is the quicunque vult of the 
Athanasian Creed, and its last word is the anathema. 
Never argue, but continually affirm and maintain 
the old teaching. Apologetics are an impertinence. 
All attempts at restating and resetting gospel truth 
in the culture of the nineteenth century is decried. 
Once allow an inch to reason, and it will take in- 
numerable miles. And, when reason does this, it 
does not give definite answers to all questions. It 
opens more questions than it can close. It chal- 
lenges its own dogmas of previous ages. It ends at 
best in semi-agnosticism. It can not speak ex ca- 
thedra. Its confession must be, " We are none of us 
infallible, not even the youngest" — not even the 
nineteenth century reason of the mere understand- 
ing. There is only one perfect Gnostic — that is God. 
And yet we, as his children, must strive to become 
like him in mind as well as in heart. Yet old text- 
books are worn out, and many new ones are very 
superficial. Many are justly weary of such unevi- 
dencing evidences. Many, though heathen with the 
understanding, are yet Christian with the heart. 
They believe, in spite of such evidences. 

Skepticism is prevalent to-day among all intel- 
lectual classes. Is the devil at the bottom of it all ? 
I am unwilling to impute it to that source as long as 
there are so many patent causes for it within the 
Church itself, which I can sum up under two heads : 
1. The Church's persistent use of the uncriticised 
category of infallibility. 2. The practical atheism of 



The Vital Idea of Religion. 99 

the Church teaching, which often banishes God from 
the secular world. 

1. Infallibility is the dream of mere seminarians, 
and the tool of ecclesiastical politicians. By both, 
the Divine Self-Revelation to human children is 
dwarfed and rendered mechanical and arbitrary. 
Fleeing the light of human reason, it buries itself in 
closets, to issue forth as the party-whip to compel 
men to obedience and faith. Refusing to notice the 
human instruments and the historical experience 
by which this Divine Revelation is mediated to 
men ; refusing to recognize the work of the Holy 
Spirit in the movements of men's minds and human 
experience in this century, it persistently anathema- 
tizes all attempts to reset the old truths in new light 
It assumes infallibility to pronounce itself infallible. 
It divorces intellectual insight from the holy life of 
love and good works. It divorces God's own Self- 
Revelation from his divine love and goodness, and 
makes it as arbitrary as the deliverances of the gods 
of ancient or modern superstition. Much of modern 
skepticism is simply the inherently just and necessary 
demand of the human spirit to know the source and 
ground of such asserted infallibility for Bible and 
Church and Reason. It is more than willing to yield 
to rational authority. But it will not, and it ought 
not to yield the blind obedience demanded to any 
authority, it must see what it is in the Bible and 
in the Church and in Reason that makes them au- 
thorities that should be respected, and that will help 
instead of hinder the aspirations of the human mind 
and heart. It insists, and rightly too, in pruning off 
excrescences, temporary and accidental elements, me- 
chanical, verbal inspiration, and ecclesiastical infalli- 



ioo Philosophy of Religion. 

bility, which sets itself above history, or manufactures 
its own history. A candid examination of any of 
these arbitrary infallibilities easily silences their ex 
cathedra tones, or makes them to be mere voices 
from the tomb or from dream-land. It opens more 
questions than any one of these authorities can an- 
swer except with its anathema. It compels it, if 
honest, to say, " I don't know," to many questions. 
I compels it to retire to the lower throne of semi- 
agnosticism. There is a vast amount of dogmatic and 
ecclesiastical rubbish, relics of by-gone contests and 
victories that must be frankly proclaimed as non-es- 
sential to the faith. The doctrine of the Divine guid- 
ance into truth, as men are able to see the truth, must 
supplant that of mechanical infallibility. The author- 
ity of the Bible and the Church must be vindicated on 
other and more real and congenial grounds. Skepti- 
cism must question, not to reject in toto but to reassert 
in more vital form. Bible and Church and Reason will 
always command men's reverence, when a true ra- 
tionale of their authority is presented. It is necessary 
for the strong, growing human spirit to question the 
absolute infallible authority, in order to submit itself 
to all worthy, adequate, ethical ones. Relatively, 
under necessary limitations of human conditions, the 
triad of Bible, Church, and Reason, will be accepted by 
anxious skeptics, as the very essential media for the 
Self-Revelation of God to men. Obedience to them 
will be self-imposed. They will be neither arbi- 
trary nor foreign. They will be the best presenta- 
tion of one's own duties, privileges, and laws. Look- 
ing at the way in which they have been evolved, and 
at the goal they seek for man, he will find in them 
all the very motions of the Holy Spirit guiding, lur- 



The Vital Idea of Religion. 101 

ing, commanding into new truth and new and fuller 
self-realization. Other authority God himself does 
not care to give to spirits made in his own image, 
and other authority his own children should neither 
expect nor desire. 

2. The second cause of much skepticism to-day is, 
the practical atheism of much Christian teaching, 
which often banishes God from the so-called secular 
life. Such teaching denies that the world is even 
God's footstool. It denies that the world is yet 
under the Divine guidance. It fences off what it calls 
the Church from what it stigmatizes as the secular life, 
refusing it any part or place in the great kingdom of 
God. It practically banishes God from the largest 
part of his own world, reduces his kingdom, alienates 
his allies, and denies the very revelation that it ad- 
mits. Religion as a cult or as dogma is elevated 
above religion as a life, above the daily activity in all 
the divinely appointed spheres of life, above science, 
civilization, industry, and morality. The spirit of 
truth and love and mutual helpfulness, which per- 
meates and sustains all the great secular institutions 
and labors — that is, the religion of Christ that there 
is in honest secular life is despised, or spoken of with 
abated approval. The religion, the communion with 
God through nature, art, through labor in the com- 
mon and the professional and scientific spheres of 
human activity, is not recognized as religion, or as 
being evidence of and as helping forward the king- 
dom of God. 

It is not too much to say that the priest who 
thinks that he manufactures God by a hoc est meus 
corpus (mumbled hocus-pocus) considers himself more 
religious than the man who labors ten hours a day 



102 Philosophy of Religion. 

for the daily bread of his family, or than the great 
artists, engineers, scientists, scholars, and philanthro- 
pists who are laboring for the well-being of human- 
ity. The priest may think so. But the great mass 
of God's children, who have, in his good Providence, 
been born in this century of human culture, will only 
say, and say rightly, that if this is true, then religion 
is of no worth to them. Formal ecclesiasticism and 
orthodoxy have made more skeptics than they have 
converted. There is often more faith in honest doubt 
of such misinterpretations of Christianity than in half 
such creeds. 

Such religion narrows instead of broadens men's 
humanity and the kingdom of heaven on earth. Such 
skepticism is really broadening the kingdom, and forc- 
ing its keepers to make broader her mantle of gener- 
ous appreciation and love for all that cultivates and 
elevates humanity. Such religion is daily calling down 
upon its head the woes pronounced upon it by the 
Christ when he saw it among the Scribes and Phari- 
sees, the ecclesiastical and puritanical keepers, not 
spreaders, of the faith in his day. Such skepticism is 
the real stirring of the Spirit, protesting against hav- 
ing its work in secular spheres condemned as profane. 

Modern skepticism is very serious and earnest and 
wistful. Much of it needs but the true presentation 
of Christianity as the life and light of the world, as the 
Divine love seeking and saving and civilizing and per- 
fecting men — the most Divine because the most human 
power on earth, to joyfully accept and enter the social 
state in which the spirit of Christ reigns. Wherever 
work is being done for the education and the progress 
of man, there is the spirit of Christ ; and where Christ 
is there is his church. That much of this is not 



The Vital Idea of Religion. 103 

within the organized Church, is as much the fault of 
the Church herself as it is of those that follow not 
after the professed keepers of his faith. See how 
Christ's Spirit is working, often unrecognized, in the 
countless non-Christian and even anti-Christian broth- 
erhoods and forms of social and co-operative socie- 
ties. Their mutual helpfulness, patience, earnestness, 
and self-sacrifice, what a really divine service of man 
they often constitute ! And yet what a cry it is to 
the Church for that divine brotherhood that was 
Christ's ideal of his church on earth ! Let the Catho- 
lic Church proclaim by deed as well as by word this 
mission to help men to the highest realization of such 
brotherhood, and it will become the Catholic Church. 
She will lead earnest skeptics into her fold, because 
they will recognize, it as their home, and not the for- 
tress of an enemy. Let the Church reveal herself as 
the means of genuine salvation for man, and not as an 
end to herself, and men who now scoff will come to 
work and worship in her fold. Identify Christianity 
with moral goodness and brotherly love, and the 
Church with all the means wherever and however 
used for the perfecting of redeemed humanity ; acr 
knowledge all the light and truth that God is dis- 
closing to the students of science, applied arts, and 
philosophy to-day as the self-revelation of the light 
which lighteneth every man that comes into the 
world — in a word, acknowledge the truth, and the 
ranks of earnest skepticism would be thinned as no 
polemical apologetics or ecclesiastical fulminating 
canons could ever thin them. Christianity is neither 
primarily nor chiefly a cult or dogma. The unjust 
over-emphasis of these two phases of Christianity have 
been the bane of Rome and Geneva in all their forms. 



104 Philosophy of Religion. 

Finality claimed for provisional forms of thought 
and worship and organization, means sterility in the 
Church and skepticism out of it. Skepticism rarely 
attacks the character of our Divine Master. Let us 
rejoice if it does attack our caricatures of his spirit 
and method and purposes. Family life, social and 
civil life, associations for the pursuit of knowledge 
and mutual self-help — none of these genuinely human 
interests and activities are thought alien to himself 
by Christ. He finds himself in them all. And when 
the worship and dogma of cult schismatize themselves 
from the larger life of Christ's Spirit in these concrete 
forms of human activity, they only belittle and render 
themselves harmful. This is that most deadly sin of 
spiritual schism, the only schism that our Lord ever 
thought of condemning. The Church excommunicates 
herself from the larger life of redeemed humanity, 
for the crime of the vital heresy of limiting the rev- 
elation and communication of Christ to his own, to 
one system and one channel. What wonder, then, 
that his sheep of the one flock are skeptical as to the 
dicta of such unbelievers? The cultured classes of 
France are all skeptical. The cult of institutionalism 
has excommunicated what the cultured world knows 
to be true, and the result is that there religion is for 
the priests and the peasants. The best men in France 
say that M. Gambetta only uttered the truth in his 
now famous mot, "Lennemi cest le clericalisme." The 
Church there means opposition to modern science 
and progress. It means the clergy. The clergy 
teach superstitious follies in the name of Christ, in- 
stead of his more patent life and light in the secular 
spheres of men's interests and duties, and measure 
all goodness by a petty ecclesiastical standard. The 



The Vital Idea of Religion. 105 

conversion of the cultured classes there means the 
abandonment of clericalism. The Bishop of Manches- 
ter has recently referred to the same evil in the Church 
of England. There are some signs of a petty but ram- 
pant revival of the same maker of skepticism in our 
own land. Hence I can not forbear making a pertinent 
quotation trom Canon Freemantle's Bampton Lecture. 
The supremacy of clericalism infallibly brings a per- 
version of the Christian ideal, and draws away the 
consciousness of dignity and holiness from common 
life by a pretended and false distinction between secu- 
lar and spiritual things. " By clericalism," he says 
(page 364), " I understand the system which unduly 
exalts the clerical office, and the function of public 
worship, so as to draw away the sense of divine 
agency and appointment from other offices and other 
functions. This tendency, as has before been said, 
is not really one which exalts the Church. It exalts 
the clergy alone ; it dwarfs and emasculates the 
Church. The clergy, and those to whom the system 
of public worship is dear, must learn to make the 
great sacrifice of Christians. They must learn to 
* live not for themselves,' to ' look not on their own 
things, but also on the things of others.' The sys- 
tem they administer must be felt not to exist for 
itself, but for the general community. They must 
efface, if need be, themselves and their system in the 
effort to save the world. They must be willing to be 
nothing, that Christ may be all in all. They must 
desire that, if it were possible, there should be not 
only holy orders of bishops and presbyters, but holy 
orders of artists, and poets, and teachers of science, 
and statesmen. They should be forward to recognize 
good in departments which are not theirs, and in 



106 Philosophy of Religion. 

forms very different from their own. A ministry 
imbued with such a spirit as this may still be the 
luminous and inspiring focus where light and heat 
are stored for diffusion through the whole mass; 
whereas, by almost identifying Christianity with pub- 
lic worship, and absorbing all ministries in the cleri- 
cal function, and thinking more of correct forms of 
appointment and ordination than of the Divine gifts 
which form the true succession of spiritual leaders, 
we may become the greatest of all obstacles to the 
establishment of the kingdom of God." 

" Ultima ratio regum " was the inscription on one 
of the cannons of Louis XIV. Some of the kings 
and priests of the Church of God have labeled their 
ecclesiastical canons with the same maxim of tyranny ; 
but until the authority of Church councils and priests 
be vindicated as rational, as " made for man" as the 
best means subordinate to the moral and spiritual 
welfare of believers — until they are thus seen to be 
jure divino, they will be inefficient. Clericalism may 
make itself obnoxious, or it may assume the method 
of Jesus and of St. Paul, and commend itself to every 
man's conscience, and thus speak with the only vital 
authority that avails in dealing with men's souls. 
Such clerical work, and such a living and Catholic 
Church, will not lack that authority which is pow- 
erful, and which skeptics really crave. Such vital 
Christianity will be a far more efficient antidote to 
doubt than whole libraries of polemical Evidences, 
Many of these volumes are as hot and as harmless as 
papal anathemas. Such " aids to faith " have recently 
been somewhat severely characterized thus : * 

* The Rev. Dr. William Kirkus, of Baltimore. 



The Vital Idea of Religion. 107 

" There is scarcely any kind of literature so ex- 
asperating, and even demoralizing", as Christian apolo- 
getics. Most of these tedious volumes are character- 
ized by a haughtiness, a truculence, a contemptuous- 
ness, a cynical indifference to the salvation of souls, a 
cheerful alacrity in sacrificing any number of sinners 
to a single syllogism, which almost make humane 
readers regret that they were not written in defense 
of the devil. Mediaeval arguments against heresy, 
Protestant arguments against Popery, Puritan argu- 
ments against Prelacy, theistic arguments against ag- 
nosticism — they are almost all alike. Opponents are 
fools or knaves, or a mischievous compound of the 
two. Moreover, they really intend to dethrone the 
Almighty and to ruin souls. They are not misguided 
* brethren ' to be * gained/ but reprobates to be de- 
stroyed by ' fire from heaven.' " 

This is too severe, at least too sweeping ; for there 
is a gathering host of devout men who are writing in 
full sympathy with the culture of the present cent- 
ury,* and yet wise enough to know that wisdom was 
not born with this generation ; men who perceive 
that Jesus has suffered almost as much from his 
friendly caricaturists as from his crucifiers, and yet 
can boldly say to the latter, " Ye know not what ye 
do " ; men who know the mutations of human lan- 
guage and conceptions, and yet maintain the necessity 



* The writers of the recent volumes of that remarkable establishment 
for producing apologetical literature — The Bampton Lecture — ably illus- 
trate this improved modern method of aiding faith. The volumes by 
Prebendary Row, Bishop Temple, Canon Freemantle, Prof. Hatch, Mr. 
R. E. Bartlett, and Prof. Cheyne are, to use a much-abused expression, 
fully abreast of modern thought, and interpret Christianity in concep- 
tions understanded of the people of this nineteenth century. 
II 



108 Philosophy of Religion, 

of Church dogma and Bible truth ; men whose un- 
faltering faith and sweet reasonableness are doing 
much to hold and win back many whom modern 
culture has alienated from formal Christianity. They 
are ready to exclaim with Schleiermacher, " Woe is 
me if Christianity be not more than my system ! " and 
yet to say yea to Coleridge's assertion, " Christianity 
finds me," and to Jacobi's, " Only in finding God 
does one find himself." Such men, however, have 
come to fully appreciate the limitations and contra- 
dictions inherent in the common language and con- 
ceptions in which Christian truth is envisaged and 
held. Both are inadequate to the content. Both 
pictorial conception and the dogmas of the mere un- 
derstanding are partial, abstract, and self-contradict- 
ory. They have their worth. They are the cre- 
ations of the human spirit brooding upon Divine 
revelation. The Holy Spirit has through them been 
guiding us to fuller apprehension of the truth. They 
are not worthless ; they are not false, except when 
held abstractly as the last utterance of the Spirit, as 
the last insight into Divine revelation, and the un- 
changeable and perfect image of the whole truth. 
And it is the same Holy Spirit that is urging men on 
to a wider vision, up loftier mounts, and into deeper 
communion. It is the same Spirit co-working with 
our spirits, groaning with our spirits, as it reveals 
the imperfection of our hitherto attainment and ex- 
pression of spiritual knowledge. This Spirit thus 
demands that we find in religion the absolute and 
self-consistent truth. Thought does demand the good 
work of replacing worn-out conceptions by new and 
more adequate ones — more adequate because more 
in touch with current thought and conceptions in 



The Vital Idea of Religion. 109 

other departments of mental activity. But it also 
demands an apprehension of the absolute ground or 
authority upon which all these rest, and an intelli- 
gent, synthetic comprehension of them all in the or- 
ganic unity of the idea of religion itself. It thus un- 
dertakes a criticism of the faculties of imagination 
and the understanding. It shows both the worth 
and the worthlessness of their work. Hegel, in his 
Logic,* fully justifies the place and work of the un- 
derstanding in giving definite but stereotyped con- 
ceptions. At the same time he shows how it must 
be transcended by the further activity of thought. 
In this work he notes chiefly the limitations of the 
language of the pictorial imagination — that is, of 
Representation (Vorste/lung), or the envisaging of the 
invisible in terms, pictures, and conceptions drawn 
from the visible and finite realm. The infinite and 
universal is represented in forms of the finite and 
contingent. It is thus manifested to us, but not ade- 
quately. The form is not adequate to the content. 
Thus, the absolute representation of the Absolute is in- 
trinsically impossible. The content of religion may 
be, and is, felt and imagined, but the ultimate demand 
of the human spirit, moved by the Divine Spirit, is 
that it also be thought. 

We have already seen how it is contained in feel- 
ing, and how it passes into the form of conception, being 
thereby only further developed instead of abolished. 
Thought now proceeds to criticise these its own cre- 
ations. This is partly the work of common rational- 
ism. It is a phase in the life of every thoughtful 
person. It is more developed in some men and in 

* Page 122. 



no Philosophy of Religion. 

some ages than in others. It appears as the Aufklae- 
rung and the Eclair cissement, as Deism and as Ration- 
alism, Skepticism and Agnosticism. Thus, it exposes 
the following chief defects of its own conceptions 
and dogmas : They are {a) stereotyped metaphors, 
(b) external and abstract propositions, and (c) mutually 
self-contradictory conceptions. Prof. Wallace has 
thus stated* Hegel's criticism of this approximate 
but inexact form of thinking in which religious truth 
is largely stated : 

" Such thinking does not grasp these objects, but 
sets them before it. (a.) It is still trameled by the 
senses. Thought and sensation strive for the mastery 
in it. Thought is bound fast to an illustration, and 
of this illustration it can not as presentative thought 
divest itself ; the eternally living idea is chained to 
the transient and perishable form of sense. It is 
metaphorical and material thinking, which is helpless 
without the metaphor and the matter, (b.) Presenta- 
tive thought envisages what is timeless and infinite 
under the conditions of time and space. It loses 
sight of the moral and spirit of historical develop- 
ment under the semblance of the names, incidents, 
and forms in which it is displayed. The historical 
and philosophical sense is lost under the antiquarian. 
Presentative thought keeps the shell, and throws 
away the kernel, (c.) The terms by which such a 
materialized thought describes its objects are not in- 
ternally connected ; each is independent of the other, 
and we only bring them together for the nonce by 
an act of subjective arrangement." 

This criticism of thought is partly the work of 

* Hegel's Logic, Prolegomena xci. 



The Vital Idea of Religion, 1 1 1 

the understanding which has itself created the object 
of criticism. It is also partly the work of the reason, 
as the faculty of the infinite, the faculty of compre- 
hension, of systemization, of concrete totality. It 
refuses to abide by the work of the understanding 
and the imagination as the ne plus ultra attainment of 
thought. The idea, as comprehensive, concrete, or- 
ganic synthesis of parts into members, free in its self- 
determination, living in all parts of itself — some such 
a speculative synthesis of apparently incongruous ele- 
ments of life and thought it is that lures arid forces 
thought on to higher attainment. Thought's faith in 
itself, in the universe, and in God, may be said to be 
faith in such a vast, self-consistent, self-developing 
system. Despair of thought is exactly despair of 
system ; but this despair is not the chronic or healthy 
state of thought. Thought is positive, aggressive, 
laborious in its persistent infusion of .the lucidity of 
reason into all within its ken. It is the logos within 
joyfully recognizing itself in the logos without. It is 
subjective consciousness ripening into self-conscious- 
ness as it is recreated through experience in the 
image of God's mind. It is thus only that man, rec- 
ognizing himself as the interpretation of experience, 
can become the adequate interpreter of it. Thought 
finds, then, all the ordinary categories of the under- 
standing and conceptions of the imagination inade- 
quate to interpret its experience into system. Sys- 
tem it must have, else agnosticism, despair, and death 
for spirit. It does not seek to utterly abolish and 
destroy the content of feeling and imagination, but to 
realize them in more vital form. Thoughtful com- 
prehension makes us neither unfeeling nor without 
understanding and imagination. As the definite and 



ii2 Philosophy of Religion. 

pictorial form is above that of undeveloped subject- 
ive feeling, so is this larger comprehension of the 
contents of the religious consciousness but an ad- 
vance in form. It is, to use the favorite and preg- 
nant phrase of Hegel, the form of necessity — that is, 
the form in which every part is mutually correlated 
and essential to every other part as the head is neces- 
sary to the heart and both necessary to the vital 
body. The highest form of necessity is seen only in 
spiritual organisms. Here necessity becomes self- 
necessity, determinism self -determinism, and the 
whole an organism of organisms w T ith self-conscious- 
ness throughout. The higher form can never be ad- 
equately illustrated or explained by a lower one. 
You can not explain the lowest organism in terms of 
inorganic bodies. You can not explain an ethical or 
spiritual organism in terms which only describe a 
physical organism. Science could not move a step 
without this admission. The lowest form of organic 
life is not very different from inorganic matter. The 
lowest form of animal life is like a plant, but different. 
Man is like an animal, but different. Mere likeness 
would reduce the exquisitely graded forms of the 
world to the blank identity of nondescript proto- 
plasm. The widest generalizations of science tend 
toward some such indescribable primal world-stuff. 
Abstracting difference after difference, it attains 
wider genera, orders, kingdoms, finally passing into 
some undifferentiated form of protoplasm. Science 
thus reconciles and unifies all things by abstracting 
all unlikeness and reducing them to identity — matter 
or force. It may thus attempt to explain man in 
terms of animal life, and animal life in terms of chem- 
ical and mechanical relations ; but it is false to nature 



The Vital Idea of Religion. 1 1 3 

in this attempt. It reaches its richer results when it 
is descriptive, and notes the differences between its 
objects that demand different grades of categories of 
description. The vegetable kingdom is rightly con- 
sidered richer than the realm where only mechanical 
and chemical relations are used ; and the animal king- 
dom is inclusive of still more various differences. 
These kingdoms rise above and upon each other. 
Chemical forces abrogate in combining separate 
atoms. Life abrogates while transforming them into 
a higher unity. The plant contains fiber and sap, 
but is more than the mere sum of these and its other 
elements. A new and higher conception is needed 
to describe the animal who contains all the ele- 
ments of the lower kingdoms, and yet is more than 
the mechanical equivalent of all the elements from 
these kingdoms that it holds in a transmuted form. 
Yet in all these relations science posits external ne- 
cessity. Any one thing is the result of the totality 
of conditions and elements implied in it. It scarcely 
dares rise to the category of true necessity, to that 
which is immanent in the idea or system of self-con- 
sciousness, where .r^relation and ^//"-determination 
are essential categories. The course of Philosophy 
ends here with just what science has as yet declined 
to accept. Its progress, too, is from lower to higher 
categories. It supplies, in fact, all the categories that 
science uses, giving them their relative truth and 
yet transcending all, while realizing them all in its 
ultimate category of the Idea, Reason, self-conscious 
Personality. It is the completion of the system of 
categories, any one of which is not false, as a mem- 
ber of the whole, only false when held as ultimate. 
Philosophy maintains that there is one system, or the 



H4 Philosophy of Religion. 

systematic unity of all things, and that this unity is im- 
manent and self-creative, self-determining as to all its 
parts or members, creating and thereby manifesting 
and realizing itself in its differences. This Idea or 
system may be chronologically last and only reached 
by infinite struggle through the study of all phenom- 
ena on lower levels ; but when once reached it is seen 
to be essentially and creatively the true first cause. 
It is the idea of the plant or animal that determines, 
creates its various parts. It is never the mere sum 
of them. The idea only realizes itself through them, 
fulfills itself in all its self-differentiations. The true 
first cause, then, is not the empirical origin but its 
completed form. Man may have sprung from the 
ape, but is not explainable by the ape and any num- 
ber of external conditions. The idea of man is more 
than the sum total of all empirical antecedents and 
concomitants. He is a man for all that. We can no 
more explain him by these than we can explain a 
grand cathedral by a description of every bit of stone 
and mortar and wood that forms it. Its idea, its 
plans as thought out in the brain of an architect, is 
its true explanation, its real first cause. Illustrations 
without number might be adduced of this unscientific 
use of the post hoc ergo propter hoc by scientists. I 
have used these few only to illustrate the difficulties 
and contradictions found by thought in current con- 
ceptions of religious truth, by which it is forced on 
to the higher comprehensive unity of the Idea. Il- 
lustrations, too, without number might be adduced 
to show how metaphorical conceptions about God 
and man are literalized, how the understanding de- 
fines and isolates these from essential relations, how 
contradictory many religious conceptions are to each 



The Vital Idea of Religion. 1 1 5 

other, how categories of thought applicable only to 
lower realms are dogmatically applied to express the 
true content of the religious relation as felt in the 
heart, how inadequate they are to represent the real 
heart of religion — that intimate, vital, congenial, in- 
dissoluble, organic, and necessary relation between 
God and man. All these it is which raises the storm 
of adverse criticism and of anxious doubt that are 
the most conspicuous phases of the religious world 
to-day. The pious soul and the devout thinker alike 
demand a higher point of view- 

The religious knowledge of ordinary thought is 
strained through finite images and materialized con- 
ceptions — is representative, figurate, and consequent- 
ly inadequate Even in the higher form of system- 
atic theology it is one-sided and inadequate because 
passed through the sieve of a narrow and rationaliz- 
ing logic. This narrow logic let free plays havoc 
with dogmas, exaggerating differences instead of giv- 
ing unity. There must, then, be a higher method of 
knowing the content of religion, of grasping the 
manifold elements of divine truth so that they shall 
be seen as correlated members of an organic whole. 
Nature, man, God, these — their reality and unity, can 
only be rationally conceived of and held under the 
form of an organic unity, which is The Speculative 
Idea of Religion. 

There is an essential necessity, then, for thought 
to translate the content of the religious relation out 
of these inadequate forms into — 

III. The Speculative Idea of Religion. — Complaint 
is sometimes made that philosophy destroys instead 
of transforms the content of the religious conscious- 
ness. It is only true in the sense that the fruit de- 



1 1 6 Philosophy of Religion, 

stroys the blossom. Those who love the blossom 
and do not appreciate the fruit will find little in the 
philosophy of religion to their taste. Those who ex- 
pect to find all the old conflicting metaphorical con- 
ceptions retained and justified in their old form will 
be disappointed. Transformation means change and 
development. It will be appreciated only by those 
who think through the transformation. The same 
objection is made to Theology that it destroys re- 
ligion, that little worth having is left of religion in 
the form of Theology or Philosophy. Further notice 
will be taken of this objection after the transforma- 
tion. 

It must be noted that we make no objection to 
the purely religious use of metaphorical conceptions. 
It is only when they cease to wing the flight heaven- 
ward, and when the understanding insists upon their 
limitations and contradictions, so that they can no 
longer be the unquestioning language of the heart, 
that thought is forced on to transcend them. We 
have admitted that the language of religion is gen- 
erally used with the tacit acknowledgment that it is 
inadequate ; that God and heaven and its blissful life 
are all " beyond compare " ; that language and im- 
agination are utterly beggared in attempting any 
exhaustive description of them ; that it multiplies 
all its conceptions by the infinite and subtracts from 
them all that is accidental, empirical, and sensuous ; 
that all these are but suggestions to the imagination 
and heart to enable the soul to immeasurably tran- 
scend them. Thought does not criticise its own lan- 
guage of devotion when thus used. It is only when 
we, or others, misconceive and abuse it that thought 
begins its dialectic, its labor of chastising love upon 



The Vital Idea of Religion. 117 

it. Our Lord himself spake much in parables — spir- 
itual truth was like various natural objects — yet even 
his disciples were sometimes with those others who 
heard but did not understand. His wonderful para- 
ble of calling his " flesh meat indeed," and his " blood 
drink indeed," was a " hard saying " to them, and he 
had to warn them that only the Spirit could give life. 
The highest representation that we make is that 
of the Absolute as God. But what does the word 
God signify to us ? What are the mental images 
and concepts that it contains for us ? That depends 
upon who we are, and at what period of life and cult- 
ure we are, at the time of uttering it. Here we may 
notice the dialectic at work at home. We begin at 
the conceptions of God held by the most superstitious " 
heathen and follow along through the higher forms 
of the world-religious, criticising and refusing to ac- 
cept any of their conceptions of God as adequate or 
worthy. We continue the examination of the Chris- 
tian conception of God in different epochs of time 
and culture, still criticising current conceptions. We 
criticise the conceptions of God that many of our 
fellow-Christians about us have. It is still fashion- 
able in some pulpits to even revile the Calvinistic 
conception as being most inhuman and most undivine. 
We find every phase of heresy repeating itself in 
common conceptions of God. We criticise our own 
conceptions. From the mother's knee to the dying 
couch we are transforming or replacing imperfect 
conceptions about God by more worthy ones. We 
acknowledge that our highest conception only faintly 
adumbrates and suggests the inexpressible Infinite 
and Absolute. Thus God remains the abstract and 
simple Absolute. This tacit acknowledgment, how- 



1 1 8 Philosophy of Religion. 

ever, has led to the shocking position that God is 
unknown and unknowable. The truth in this doc- 
trine of the Unconditioned is that he is inconceiv- 
able under any temporal and visible conditions ; that 
our concept-making faculty only creates out of such 
conditions, and therefore can never adequately repre- 
sent him to the eye, soul, or mind. 

We try to make our conception mean more by 
adding attributes — mere generalized conceptions — 
which are not seen to proceed out of the essential 
nature of God. They are fixed and independent 
qualities not mutually related and mutually creating. 
They are conceptions about God, not derivative from 
him. Lacking substantial ground and organic rela- 
tion, they are seen to be formally and mutually self- 
contradictory the moment they are taken out of their 
purely devotional use. They are externally attached 
to the empty conception of the Absolute. If God is 
Almighty, there is no place for him to be All-wise. 
If he is just, he can not be merciful.* A scheme of 
these attributes is, therefore, proposed by theologians 
for harmonizing these contradictions, which barely 
satisfies while it is being made. The defect in this 
method of defining God through attributes is, that 
they are only special characteristics, whose only 
ground is our subjective conceptions. Thus comes 
the feeling, so strong among the Orientals, that God 
is the " many-named," and yet the nameless. A suc- 
cession of such predicates can no more describe the 
essential nature of God than a series of points can 
describe a straight line, or than a series of distinct 
organs can describe a living animal. The life is more 

* Philosophic der Religion, vol. i, p. 153, and vol. ii, p. 230. 



The Vital Idea of Religion, 119 

than all organs ; in fact, creates and integrates and 
lives in them all. They do not determine or describe 
it, but the reverse. We may call God the Creator. 
In this figurate conception, not unjustly labeled " the 
carpenter theory," there is no essential or necessary 
relation between God and the world. He might or 
might not have created the world. His creative at- 
tribute is not an essential one, but depends upon his 
arbitrary choice. It defines God only as related to 
a contingent world, thus indicating his relation to an- 
other and not to himself. Then his almightiness cre- 
ated only dead, inert matter, without form and void. 
His wisdom is then conceived as coming to repair 
his first creation. He might, moreover, have re- 
frained from using both these attributes. The crea- 
tion is not essential to his immanent, divine, self- 
activity. " But we are conscious that God is not 
represented in a living way in this enumeration of 
arbitrary and self-contradictory predicates. To say 
that they must be conceived only in sensu eminentiori, 
does not remove the contradictions. The true solu- 
tion is only contained in the Idea (Idee) in which they 
are seen to be self-determinations of God, who in 
them all differentiates himself from himself, and yet 
eternally subsumes and realizes himself in them." * 

Thought makes the like criticism of the doctrine 
of original sin, and of the Holy Trinity, as held in 
ordinary religious conception. Hegel himself is the 
staunchest maintainer of the Nicene doctrine of the 
Godhead. Its doctrine of the Trinity is the only ab- 
solute and essential definition of God. But the ordi- 
nary, unphilosophical conception of the Trinity is a 

* Philosophic der Religion, vol. ii, p. 230. 
12 



120 Philosophy of Religion, 

mixture of sensible and empirical elements with super- 
sensible and philosophical ones, of picture-thought 
(Vorstellung) and of the speculative thought idea 
(Begriff), all enveloped in mystery. If positive, defi- 
nite conception is attempted, the result is either trithe- 
ism or Sabellianism. To excommunicate for these two 
errors would be to almost empty the seats of the 
laity and to decimate the stalls of the clergy. 

This is the continual process. Metaphors are 
used, then stereotyped and abused, and then criti- 
cised. But all this is the work of the self-same mind. 
Metaphors are for worship, and thus they reveal 
without defining God. They are literalized and used 
in constructing schemes of theology. They are ar- 
gued about and with ; but argument ends in reveal- 
ing their inadequacy, and the demand then is for 
something better, or for nothing at all. It is I who 
worship, I who argue, and I who criticise, doubt, 
and press forward to self-consistent systemization of 
necessary truth. We refuse to abide in the world of 
abstractions and contradictions into which the criti- 
cal understanding has uncreated our fair world of 
sentiment, fancy, and devotion. We decline its prof- 
fered gift of disjecta membra. 

The parts in his hand he may hold and class, 
But the spiritual link is lost, alas ! 

The demand of thought now is for the spiritual 
link which shall make these dry bones live, recre- 
ating and living in " the whole body fitly joined 
together, . . . making increase of the whole unto the 
building up of itself in love." God and his attri- 
butes, man and his faculties, the world and its mani- 
foldness — is there no process by which these can be 



The Vital Idea of Religion. 121 

held as essentially and organically related ? Is there 
no system? Is chaos and not cosmos ultimate for 
thought ? The dialectic of thought forces us to seek 
a process of mediation, by which thought does attain 
unto the idea, system, cosmos, in which the religious 
consciousness finds its fullest content and vindica- 
tion. Religion is the actual and mutual relation of 
the Divine and human spirit. What is thus given 
immediately as the naive perception of the soul, has 
been criticised and shown to be impossible by the 
understanding, translating conceptions into definite 
and mutually independent entities. God is there, 
we are here ; any communion is only fancy. But 
thought denies its own agnosticism, and appeals to 
Philosophy to show the coherent, systematic, rational, 
and necessary relation of God and man. There must 
be, is its naive faith, an idea or an absolute Idea (Idee) 
in which all the constituent elements of the religious 
consciousness shall be seen to be correlated mem- 
bers of an organic whole, in which one member im- 
plies and necessitates the whole, while the whole im- 
plies and necessitates and finds itself in all the mem- 
bers. Thus religion can be demonstrated to be 
necessary in the high sense of being implicit in the 
self-development and realization of the Absolute Idea 
itself. Hegel says that " every act of mind contains 
implicitly the principle which, when purified and de- 
veloped, rises to religion." * This is the high argu- 
ment of the whole Logic — no thing, no thought is iso- 
lated and alone. All meet and mingle and have their 
only being in Him who is the ultimate category of 
thought, and at the same time the primal source of 

* Logic, p. 115. 



122 Philosophy of Religion. 

all things and all thought. Only the necessary is the 
free, but it is free only when it is not necessitated 
from without, or by the totality of mechanical con- 
ditions, but, when its necessity is immanent ', springs 
from its own idea, is its own realization or self-de- 
termination. But this result is only reached by 
thought, through a winding and dialectic process. 
This process is the work of thought upon the relig- 
ious consciousness. Or we may say that it is the 
implicit mediation of thought. We have now to 
note some of the stages in — 2. The mediation of the 
religious consciousness within itself. 

The religious consciousness keeps insisting that 
its knowledge of God and spiritual truth is immediate. 
Philosophy finds that the simplest kind of knowledge 
has passed through media ; much more is it true of 
the rich content of the religious consciousness. We 
call a thing immediate that is known directly through 
itself without any relations to other things. It is the 
naive perception, the first impression that a thing 
makes upon our senses, before it is seen in a net- 
work of relations and in the process of a develop- 
ment. A man considered thus immediately is the 
child, an oak is the acorn. Mediation signifies the 
process by which a thing passes out of its immedi- 
ateness into its development and realization. A cult- 
ured man is the mediated man — the untutored child, 
who has passed through all the media of social, po- 
litical, scientific, and literary culture. In fact, every 
concrete thing exists thus by means of relations. 

Nothing in the world is single : 

All things by a law divine 
In one another's being mingle. 



The Vital Idea of Religion. 123 

This relation of one thing to another in a depend- 
ent, conditioned way is called Reflection. It is viewed 
in the light which it casts upon another, or which 
another casts upon it. This is the first form of rela- 
tioning or connecting the disjecta membra, the iso- 
lated phenomena of observation. We associate one 
with another, thereby knowing them both better. 
Thought does not stop with mere definition of sepa- 
rate things. The canon of identity and the law of con- 
tradiction do not express its whole work. They affirm 
that every finite thing is itself and no other, and that 
A is not B. But, even in thus defining, thought re- 
lates and connects things, both with each other and 
with the defining mind. This is fully worked out in 
the second division of the Logic — Essence (Wesen), all 
of whose categories are those of reflection of one 
thing into and upon one another. Substance and 
qualities, cause and effect, are the chief of these cate- 
gories of reflection or relation. Here the world of 
separate phenomena, of qualitative and quantitative 
differences, merges into a world of infinite variety, of 
essentially related and transitory existences ; each of 
which is only as it determines and is determined 
by others, according to universal laws. Attribute 
means nothing without substance, effect without 
cause, and vice versa. These are the categories that 
modern science uses in relating and correlating end- 
lessly diverse phenomena into its system, held to- 
gether by external and mechanically necessary laws. 
It is here that false necessity enters with its chain of 
absolute power. One thing is necessitated by all 
others to which it is related. Every effect has a 
cause. It is what it is because it is so determined 
or created by its cause. Man is thus viewed as an 



124 Philosophy of Religion. 

effect of the total physical conditions which enter 
into and environ him. Within the adamantine em- 
brace of this necessity all things are swept and kept 
chained forever and forever. It is needless to do more 
than thus refer to this doctrine of necessity or deter- 
minism that is maintained in all its rigor by the chiefs 
of science to-day. These categories of science are 
the work of thought, and can not be said to be false. 
Yet they are false when held as ultimate. Thought 
uses, but refuses to be bound by, or to stop with, 
them. It goes on to mediate them into higher and 
more adequate forms. Relativism and physical ne- 
cessity are superseded by the idea (Begriff) which 
itself evolves all difference and all relations out of 
itself, and realizes itself in and through them. Here 
relation becomes ^//"-relation, the determined be- 
comes the ^//"-determined. Here thought posits 
the category of spiritual, organic unity, of which all 
physical and vital organisms are but faintest adum- 
brations. It is a concrete, living, self-differentiating, 
and self-integrating whole, apart from which no mem- 
ber is aught but a fragment, and which itself, apart 
from its members, is naught. It is an organism, not 
merely of organs, as in a physical body, but of organ- 
isms. The life of the whole is in every part, and 
every part lives only in the whole. Each part is 
a microcosm, and the whole the macrocosm, of free, 
self-determined, spiritual activity. Hegel makes the 
category of Reciprocity to be the bridge from the 
necessity of relativity to the freedom of the idea. A 
cause is only a cause in its effect. It is bound to its 
effect as much as its effect is to it. Each is an alter 
ego, finds itself and not an enemy in the other. They 
are reciprocally complementary. Thus, reciprocity 



The Vital Idea of Religion. 125 

is a higher category than cause and effect, and trans- 
forms their external necessity into immanent necessity. 
This infinite connection with self becomes the idea (Be- 
griff) which freely posits all differences — substance, 
cause, and effect — and yet finds itself in them. The 
truth of necessity is thus seen to be freedom. Things 
are mutually related and determined by each other, 
not as enemies but as congenial relatives — " each of 
them, in its connection with the other, being as it were 
at home and combining with itself."* The Idea con- 
tains all the earlier categories of thought merged in it. 
It is infinite creative form, f complete in all its crea- 
tions, and not in distinction from them. Thought pro- 
ceeds further through the categories of the subjective 
idea (logical forms proper) of the objective idea, in such 
forms as mechanism, chemism, and teleology, to the Abso- 
lute Idea (Idee) or Spirit, or Self-conscious Personality, 
which is beyond and creative of, yet lives in, without 
destroying, the personality of all other spirits — "in 
knowledge of whom is eternal life, and whose service is 
perfect freedom." This logical ultimate, is the chro- 
nological first, the vorjai? vorjo-ecos which Aristotle long 
ago termed the supreme form of the idea. The simplest 
act of the mind, the truth grasped by any of the lower 
categories leads out from itself, foundationless and 
restless till it rests in its perfect explanation and cause : 

. . . Flower in the crannied wall, 
I pluck you out of the crannies ; 
Hold you here, root and all, in my hand, 
Little flower ; but if I could understand 
What you are, root and all, and all in all, 
I should know what God and man is. 

* Cf. Logic, p. 243. f Ibid. p. 247. 



126 Philosophy of Religion. 

But we are anticipating too much. We have yet 
to notice some of the steps of mediation by which 
this mount of transfiguration is reached. The Logic 
does nothing else than exhibit this restless progress 
of thought through all lower and progressively more 
adequate categories to this Category of categories. 
Thinking means just this process of finding itself ] its 
higher freedom, in realms that at first seem foreign 
necessity. No one category is false which one goes 
through on the way to truth, but is itself a phase of 
truth, an organic element of the Idea, which becomes 
false the moment it is torn from the living body. 
The Idea is the completed system, not of fragments, 
but of organic members. Hegel's Logic is thus at 
once Metaphysics and Theology. The whole of it is 
an explication of the nature and activity of God. So 
a full explication of the mediation of thought would 
require a full exposition of the Logic. Here we can 
notice but a few of the steps, by the way of example. 

We talk of immediate knowledge, immediate in- 
tuition, and of things immediately present to our 
senses. The truth is, that there is nothing that is im- 
mediate or unrelated. 

" Nothing in the world is single." Everything to 
be known must be known through relations, and to 
be fully known must be seen as a member of a sys- 
tem. The absolutely unmediated, unrelated, is the 
absolutely indefinable, unknowable. Strip any exist- 
ent thing of all its relations, and its mere existence is 
mere nothing. It is only cognizable and real as it 
becomes related, mediated. The seed may be said 
to be the immediate form of a tree ; but the seed it- 
self is the result of many mediations. I am here, but 
my immediate presence here is mediated by my hav- 



The Vital Idea of Religion, 127 

ing made the journey hither. Even in the lowest 
form of sensuous perception, knowledge is the result 
of the relation of a subject to an object. I am con- 
scious of a thing or of myself as affected, impressed, 
mediated by the object perceived. Cogito ergo sum 
is sometimes proposed as signifying immediate knowl- 
edge of self ; but I know myself only as thinking, act- 
ing, living. There is no passive substrate, or inact- 
ive ego. Thinking activity is its very essence. 

Quite as true is it that all religious knowledge 
is mediated. Christian education is the educing of 
something by means of something. From childhood 
up there is the mediation of Bible instruction, cate- 
chism, forms of worship, creeds, and doctrines. Bap- 
tism is not an opus operatum, done once for all. It in- 
volves instruction in "all things which a Christian 
ought to know and believe to his soul's health." 
Baptism is only completed in Confirmation. " Ye 
are to take care that this child be brought to the 
Bishop, to be confirmed by him so soon as he can say 
the Creed, the Lord's Prayer, and the Ten Command- 
ments, and is sufficiently instructed in the other parts 
of the Church Catechism set forth for that purpose." 

The Holy Communion follows, still further real- 
izing the Sacrament of Baptism, which can not be 
said to be really finished till sanctification is attained. 
The Roman Church completes it by the Sacrament 
of Extreme Unction. 

Revealed religion is religion mediated by revela- 
tion. Revelation is mediated by signs and wonders, 
and mighty works, and a whole course of historical 
manifestations. It is truth done in history. 

In what is called the testimony of the Spirit there 
is the relation of the human to the Divine Spirit, 



128 Philosophy of Religion. 

made possible and realized by means of all previous 
spiritual culture. 

Religion considered as the elevation of the human 
spirit to the Divine is a process either from the finite 
self and world to the Infinite, or from the Infinite to 
ourselves as included in it. Our knowledge of God 
through the so-called proofs of his existence is pro- 
fessedly mediated knowledge, passing from step to 
step in a process of argument. Kant has forever 
shown how they fail as formal demonstrations. We 
must note their limitations as formal proofs, and yet 
maintain the labor of thought they contain. Hegel 
says that they are only a formal statement of the im- 
plicit logic of religion, only ways of analyzing and 
describing that inward movement of mind above the 
things of time and sense, or that leap or flight of 
thought from the natural to the supernatural as its 
own true self. Thought does make this leap. It 
does thus intelligize the data of sensations and elicit 
universality out of them. Considering nature, it rises 
to God. This does not mean that they find Him as 
the result of the widest induction. It means that 
nature implies God, that nature is the "other" of 
God, who, though seen in consequence of, is also seen 
as the absolute ground of the initial step and the 
whole process. Neither is He found at the end of a 
syllogism, though the formal statement of the onto- 
logical argument seems to imply this. In truth, it as- 
serts thought's own self-necessitated relation to God. 

As formal proof s all these vainly write the sign of 
equality between all knowledge and God. God is 
not merely the equivalent of all finite things, effects, 
design, intelligence, nor of the highest human con- 
ception of him. " It is not on the finite ground oc- 



The Vital Idea of Religion. 129 

cupied by the Sciences that we can expect to meet 
the indwelling presence of the Infinite. Lalande was 
right when he said that he had swept the whole 
heaven with his glass and had not seen God." * Yet 
these proofs " which start from finite being give an 
expression to the necessary exaltation of thought to 
God." They are no inventions of an over-subtle re- 
flection, but the necessary and native channel in 
which the movement of mind runs, f We must ad- 
mit, after Kant and John Stuart Mill, that merely as 
arguments or formal proofs they fail. We say that 
they give very inadequate expression to the inner, 
implicit logic of religion and thought, which syllo- 
gizes God and man in indissoluble union.if 

All proof is through mediation or the connecting 
of one thing with another in necessary relation ; but 
this necessary relation may be merely mechanical. It 
can be proved that a roof is necessary to a house, and 
shingles and nails to a roof. All forms of external 
effects are necessitated by their causes or by the to- 
tality of empirical conditions that will not permit it 
to be otherwise. Given one, you can prove the other. 
Then there is subjective necessity. We are so consti- 
tuted that we can not feel otherwise. Given certain 
conditions, and we can prove certain subjective emo- 
tions. Then there is proof from logical necessity. 
The thing to be proved is contained in, deduced 
from, dependent upon, necessitated by the premise. 
No one of these forms of proof is congruous with the 
being of God. He is the underivative, undeducible, 
and found not by the widest possible inductions of 

* The Logic, p. 105. \ Ibid., p. 113. 

\ Hegel makes extended examination of these proofs throughout his 
Logic, and chiefly in a large appendix to his Philosophic der Religion. 



130 Philosophy of Religion. 

science ; and yet neither sound common sense nor 
philosophy will yield up the right to rise to God 
from and out of the empirical view of the world. 
Man is a being who thinks, and thinks not only in the 
categories which science uses, but also in the cate- 
gories of religion and philosophy. Thinking elicits 
not only the universality of science out of finite 
things, but also thinks the concrete universality 
which religion calls God. The finite implies the in- 
finite as the center implies a circumference, the rela- 
tive and dependent imply the absolute, the transitory 
the eternal ; the wisdom, life, and truth in the world 
imply an all-wise, almighty, eternally living God. 
No criticism can destroy or antiquate this implicit 
logic of the human mind. The formal statements of 
this process are not merely invalid, but the proof they 
afford creates at best a hard, cold, unsatisfying con- 
viction. They do not give us the vital knowledge of 
God. None can wonder at their insufficiency to con- 
vert an atheist; but they are misinterpreted when 
accepted only at their formal, logical worth. They 
very inadequately describe that movement of spirit 
that makes the ascent ; but this ascent of the spirit, 
though above the comprehension of the understand- 
ing, is neither superhuman nor mysterious nor un- 
real. It is the same . I as thinking which is in this 
movement of spirit. It is the same thought, which 
with its abstract logical method fails to relate organ- 
ically and necessarily God, man, and the world into 
a rational and coherent system. It can only allow 
them to exist in side -by -side mechanical relations. 
Deism is its highest Theology, agnosticism its ul- 
timate attitude toward the non - finite. Thought 
pauses, but only pauses at this stage. Finite cosmos 



The Vital Idea of Religion. 131 

does not satisfy it now as the unscientific view of the 
world did not at an earlier stage. It relates itself to 
the Infinite ; it refuses its former theory of Relativism, 
and says that the relation is now seen to be vital, or- 
ganic, essential ; it denies its former maxim, Omnis de- 
terminatio est negatio, and asserts that every relation 
or determination or limit means new and fuller con- 
crete existence ; it asserts that the finite and Infinite 
are thus organically related, and hence that we have 
only a phantom or a fragment when we hold either 
one in separation from the other. 

Hegel's chief work, therefore, consists in showing 
the inadequacy of the ordinary conceptions of both 
the Infinite and finite, from which spring most of our 
intellectual woes in the shape of relativism, skepti- 
cism, and bad Theology. Thought works in the 
form of the dialectic upon the inadequate concep- 
tions of the Infinite and the finite, forcing them on 
out of their unnatural separation through successive 
self-contradictions and self-abrogations till both are 
fulfilled in each other and the true concrete Infinite 
appears. 

Herein is demonstrated for thought the truth of 
the heart of religion — i. e., real, living, organic com- 
munion of man and God. The problem of philosophy 
is always that of determining with increasing accu- 
racy the significance and the mutual relations of the 
three great objects of thought — God, the world, and 
man. False definitions and theories concerning these 
can not but have a blighting influence upon religion. 
The religious relation may be naively apprehended. 
But thought is as much a part of me as religious 
feeling, and when it goes to work it must see for it- 
self how the finite and the Infinite are related. God 
13 



132 Philosophy of Religion, 

and man are not discordant, irreconcilable ideas, but 
essential parts of one organic system — of its own sys- 
tem — of pure thought — of Philosophy. Religion as- 
serts and lives by the real relation of real God and 
real man. Philosophy here only attempts to under- 
stand, to see for itself what is in religion, so as to justify 
it against all criticism that it makes in its lower forms 
of observation, of reflection, of formal logic, and the un- 
derstanding. This process of the dialectic of thought, 
through its own self-posited criticism, through posi- 
tivism, subjectivism, idealism, pantheism, agnosticism, 
to its own ultimate assertion of the true concrete 
Infinite, wherein both God and man have the fullest 
reality, is necessarily a dry and prolix one. To 
think exhaustively is always to think God the ex- 
planation of all, though not the pantheistic all, for 
the thinker remains ; though explained by God, he is 
not annihilated, but realized. Thought embraces all 
— the totality — God, man, and the world — in its organ- 
ic system. Each without the other is an abstraction, 
and thus unreal and false. In this, each element 
though dependent, receives its concrete, full, inde- 
pendent, free realization. The true organism is a 
unity of organisms, organic in all its elements. This 
is the system or Idea that philosophy has ever been 
more and more adequately apprehending. Despair 
of this is despair of everything rational. Despair of 
any such a final synthesis of all elements of existence 
is despair or doubt of the worth and reality of any 
partial syntheses. This is the goal of all thought, 
but no less is it also the presupposition which under- 
lies and inspires all its activity, even in its negative, 
critical, skeptical, iconoclastic phases. For, to use a 
favorite maxim of Hegel, to be conscious of a limit, 



The Vital Idea of Religion. s 133 

of an imperfection, implies that one is already above 
it, sees beyond, and criticises the imperfect by a 
more perfect idea or system. Thus skepticism itself, 
as well as the refutation of all skepticism, implies this 
idea of organic system, or the totality. A foot-rule 
implies infinity. Though it can not measure infinity, 
it has its very being in infinity. We perceive the 
limitations of our thought, because we see that our 
thought is grounded in and a part of absolute 
thought. The central, inspiring idea of science — 
that of the correlation of all parts of the universe in 
a system — goes part way toward this ultimate syn- 
thesis. It reaches the idea of cosmos, as a system or 
totality of things, mechanically and necessarily bound 
together — a mechanical universe, but not the rational 
soul of the universe. So, too, does formal logic essay 
a synthesis of all elements of knowledge, though ulti- 
mately reducing all to a universal blank identity, or 
nonentity. In both these phases of thought the idea 
of relation and correlation fail to rise, as thought 
finally insists upon doing, to the idea of self-relation ; 
of relation that is the activity of self-conscious intelli- 
gence, of a totality that is neither material, mechani- 
cal, chemical, nor vital, but that of concrete, Absolute 
Spirit. In the light of this ultimate category of 
Thought all the lower and inadequate ones are seen 
to have their relative and essential worth. Man com- 
prehending it lives, moves, and has his most true, free, 
and real being in it. Indeed, any interpretation of 
Hegel which attributes to him the denial of person- 
ality and freedom to either God or man, is not worth 
the paper it is written on. With these prefatory re- 
marks I now propose to give a brief exposition of 
the dry and formal process by which he shows the 



134 Philosophy of Religion, 

movement of thought to this ultimate goal, thereby- 
justifying for thought, the reality of the religious 
consciousness. He continues the process of medi- 
ation in knowledge from the point of observation 
and reflection, and shows two things: i. That the 
finite is meaningless without vital relation to the Infi- 
nite ; that finite spirit presupposes and is only intel- 
ligible in the light of the idea of the Infinite Spirit. 
2. That the true Infinite can not exist, as the non- 
finite, but contains in its very nature organic relation 
to the finite. 

The process of mediation in knowledge goes pri- 
marily through observation and reflection. Observa- 
tion is empirical, and posits the Infinite as outside of 
mind, as force, law, order, or cause. So, too, does 
religion at this standpoint posit its infinite as an ex- 
ternal absolute upon which it is dependent. This ex- 
ternal infinite limits us and makes us finite. There 
is no overlapping of the two objects. We find 
ourselves thus limited on many sides, by external 
nature, by animal wants, and inherited proclivities. 
We feel all such limitations as foreign and hostile, 
preventing us from being what we might otherwise 
be. Religion, however, leads us to reconcile our- 
selves with all such limitations, and to declare that 
all things are ours, that God is for us, and therefore 
nothing that his providence surrounds us with can 
be other than helpful to us. Thus, in religion, we 
overcome and pass beyond such limits as animals 
never do. But mere observation does not thus break 
through the limits seen placed about man. I am 
only what I am. All else is another. I am limited 
and finite, and call the infinite the unlimited. But 
this implies that the two, the finite and the Infinite, 



The Vital Idea of Religion. 135 

are mutually related ; but so related that the finite 
resolves into nothingness before the Infinite. In 
feeling, this relation produces the sense of depend- 
ence and of fear. But there is also another side to 
this relation. I may be finite, but I can assert myself 
— be something. Thus, even the atheist may main- 
tain his personal morality, in spite of all the un- 
known infinite which limits him. God can not be' 
known. Observation may sweep the heavens with 
its telescope and not find him. But we can do with- 
out Him. We can be men ; doing all that in us lies 
to live honest, faithful parents and citizens. We can 
have the religion of humanity, and finally — 

. . . join the choir invisible 
Of those immortal dead, who live again 
In minds made better by their presence ; live 
In pulses stirred to generosity, 
In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn 
For miserable aims that end with self, 
In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars, 
And with their mild persistence urge man's search 
To vaster issues. 

This is the loftiest funeral anthem sung by Pos- 
itivism — immortality of good influence upon suc- 
ceeding generations, but not with the choir spiritual 
in the presence of God. 

With positivism the gods are gone away, to re- 
turn no more. We may, indeed, long for their re- 
turn, but the longing is a vain one. We must be 
content with our finiteness. The unknowable Infinite 
makes us finite, and also makes us emphasize our- 
selves as the only real absolute. I may long and 
strive after the infinite— the beyond — but I evidently 



136 Philosophy of Religion. 

remain simply in my finiteness. All such striving 
is my own doing. If I apply such predicates as all- 
wise and all-good to the beyond, the infinite, they 
are only my own productions — exist in me and not 
in the Unknowable — and have no objective worth. 
I am shut up within my own finite limits. If I could 
get out into the infinite, I should only thereby be 
annihilated. The infinite, call it by what divine or 
devilish name I please, exists only within my finite 
self. Thus, in my striving after the infinite, by which 
I feel limited, I am only limiting myself. In all this 
/ am. And thus I negate the limiting infinite. 1 
am, and I am what I am, and I am what I ought to 
be, just as stone and tree are. I am what I am by 
nature, and so I am good. Evil is not in me. Faults 
and sins are only accidental and negative. This 
much I allow to evil. But I can and do atone for 
such accidental evil by casting it away, denying 
that it belongs to my nature. I reconcile myself 
with myself. There can be no other reconciliation. 

Further, it may be held, on this standpoint, that 
the good is just what seems good to the individual. 
To follow one's nature, to be true to one's instincts, 
appetites, desires, and passions, is to be good. I 
can not sin. All that I do 1 do according to my 
nature, and I am by nature good. But let us ex- 
amine more closely the concept of the finite, and first 
in the popular sense of the word. 

(a.) The Sensuous Finite. — To be finite is to be 
mortal. Satisfaction of appetites may momentarily 
lull the sense of sensuous limitation. But the appe- 
tite constantly reappears. Nothing but death can 
annul my finiteness. Death is the great liberator — 
the negation of my sensuous limitations. But death 



The Vital Idea of Religion. 137 

itself is a negation, a manifest nothing. In this nega- 
tion of the finite, the Spirit appears. Thought asserts 
itself, though only in the form of imagination. 

(b.) Finiteness from the standpoint of Reflection. — 
In reflection we pass out of our isolated, subjective 
selves. We consider ourselves in the light reflected 
from our relation to other things. We are what we 
are in relation to something else. Here the infinite 
appears. But is is only as a regressus ad infinitum. 
Any one thing implies another, and this something 
else ; and the mind may thus lose itself in the end- 
less succession of objects, without ever finding a 
resting-place — a progress toward an inaccessible that 
is no more progress than that of a blind horse in a 
tread-mill. Hdvra pel. Mind as reflection or under- 
standing can never reach the true infinite — the causa 
sui, which, however, is a categorical imperative to 
mind. We are in a world of innumerable, manifold, 
finite things, each separate and distinct from the 
others. A is A and not B, C, etc., ad infinitum. Our 
knowledge, at this standpoint, is simply that of a 
collection of facts, of particulars negatively related. 
This is the lowest and yet the most consistent form 
of sensationalism and positivism. So too, in empiri- 
cal ethics, sensual epicureanism is ultimate. Enjoy 
the pleasure at hand. Banish or lull the limit of de- 
sire by gratifying it. Catch the fleeting, individual 
pleasure ; the next and the next will be no more nor 
other. There is no totality for thought, no absolute 
good for the soul. But this knowledge may fly from 
star to star, and yet the flight must on and on. Thus 
pleasure may satisfy one sense and then another only 
to find them awaken again — up and on after another 
pleasure. Carlyle's shoe-black can not be made 



138 Philosophy of Religion. 

happy for more than an houi or two by " the whole 
finance-ministers and upholsterers and confectioners 
in joint-stock company." Give him oceans of Hoch- 
heimer and a throat like Ophiuchus, and he still wants 
more and better. Give him half a universe, and he 
will immediately fight for the possession of the other 
half. But this is the place to merely indicate, not 
to refute this standpoint, which has never been long 
held by men who rank themselves above and not 
below the brutes. Here the ideal of knowledge and 
goodness can never be reached because it is only that 
of a huge quantity instead of that of the concrete 
totality. We can heap monstrous numbers, mount- 
ains of millions, upon each other, add world to world 
until time grows old, and awful weariness overcomes 
the soul, and yet we are only in the finite. Here 
the infinite remains only a bigger finite. But we see 
that, to make this judgment of finiteness, implies an 
infinite. To be conscious of a limit is virtually to 
transcend the limit — to see beyond. The finite is 
that, which is not infinite, which implies that the in- 
finite is that which is not finite. But at first these 
two appear as limiting each other, and the infinite is 
again reduced to a finite or a limited thing. It is 
limited by the finite. It is only everything except 
the finite which it is not. If I define it as everything, 
then it swallows up the finite. But, however I con- 
ceive it, it is still I myself who thus conceive it and 
give it being. It is my own product. Thus the Ego 
is all that can be affirmed. This subjective Idealism 
may take two forms, the empirical and the tran- 
scendental. I may either uninfinitize or infinitize the 
Ego. I am the measure of the universe. I create 
it. But I may be only a poor, finite, sensuous being. 



The Vital Idea of Religion. 139 

The infinity which I create may only be an infinity 
of thought. I create, but I also swallow up in my 
finite self the whole universe. It is worth nothing. 
Chaos, cosmos, and chaos again. I can never get 
outside of myself, beyond my own mental processes 
and conceptions. But I may either deny or assert 
the worth and reality of myself. Here the concep- 
tion of the Ego gives the comparative worth to the 
self-created world : 

Tis with our judgments as with our watches : none 
Go just alike ; yet each believes his own — 

or, " and no one believes his own." This last is the 
affirmation of the empirical skeptic. It may take 
the form of mock humility or of the current agnos- 
ticism. I can not know. I can not even see through 
a glass darkly. I am a misologist and ultimately a 
pessimist. The Ego which creates and measures all 
objects of knowledge is only an empirical, sensuous 
Ego, and its creations are worth nothing. But this 
false humility easily changes into false pride : " Each 
believes his own." " The humility of the finite Ego 
changes into the arrogance of godless self-deifica- 
tion." " The everlasting yea " follows the " center 
of indifference," into which " the everlasting nay " 
had been precipitated. Shelley's Prometheus Bound 
asserts his divinity, and defies the wrath of Jove. 
The calcined Ego, the caput mortuum, the pessimistic 
shoe-black comes to realize and assert his greatness, 
to find a whole infinite in himself which he can not, 
with all his sophistries, quite bury under the finite. 
Thus, Schopenhauer is closed, and we open Fichte. 
Es leuchtet mir ein, " I see a glimpse of it." " America 
is here or nowhere." Cosmos appears in all its truth 



140 Philosophy of Religion. 

and beauty. The finite and the infinite are one. I 
am that one. It is not the empirical, egositic I, but 
the absolute universal I that focuses itself in me. We 
twain are no longer two, but one. Fichte, who repre- 
sents the highest phase of this subjective idealism, 
indignantly denies that he means to make the world 
the product of the empirical Ego. It is the Ego that 
contains in its essential nature the finite and the in- 
finite.* Fichte approaches very nearly to the true 
philosophical conception of the essential relation of 
the finite and the Infinite, as the concrete, organic 
system of thought which Hegel calls the Idea (Idee) 
Spirit, God. But mere subjectivity, even though it 
be that of the universal Ego, can never free itself 
from abstractions and lack of objectivity. Its unity 
of the finite and the infinite is one in which neither 
term gets full rights, and one upon which no religion 
is really possible. For religion demands that its 
God be absolute, self-creative, self-dependent, self- 
relating, and not merely dependent upon the indi- 
vidual. In fact, as we can see historically, the high- 
est flight toward religion on this standpoint soon 
falls back on the lower phase of agnosticism, epi- 
cureanism, and pessimism. The so-called left-wing 
Hegelians (Strauss, Feuerbach, Bruno Baur, Arnold 
Ruge) attempted to fasten this standpoint upon 
Hegel himself, and soon reduced themselves to the 
lowest phase of egoistic materialism. Only in man 
does God come to consciousness. It seems needless 
to say that it was the logical atheism of this posi- 
tion that Hegel combats throughout all his works. 



* Cf. Fitche's Science of Knowledge, by C. C. Everett, D. D., pp. 
99, 253, 268. 



The Vital Idea of Religion. 141 

He combats, too, the higher phase of this idealism 
which emphasizes, as Fichte did, the God-side of the 
content of the individual consciousness, saying that re- 
ally no religion is possible on this standpoint. Fichte 
himself, it is true, lived and wrote under the sublime 
consciousness of God. Hegel's only contention is 
that, in the philosophy of Fichte,* the explication of 
the two sides of the religious relation is false. He 
insists upon passing outside of subjective idealism, in 
order that God and man may both be truly appre- 
hended in the organic relation to each other that 
constitutes religion. His system is that of absolute 
Idealism, or the identity of thought and reality, which 
translates the whole experience into a universe of 
thought. It is only when the infinite God is cog- 
nized as thought, or self-conscious mind, as the In- 
finite who manifests himself in the differences, of the 
finite world, and yet is not therein limited by some- 
thing outside of himself, that finite man can be fully 
and adequately conceived. 

He has shown that the finite does not get its due 
in the form of immediate knowledge, or in that of re- 
flection, or the common understanding. What is de- 
manded for thought is that our knowledge must be 
comprehensive and coherent, or systematic. Our 
ideas of nature, man, and God, of the finite and the 
Infinite, must not be conceived as discordant and 
heterogeneous, but as related to each other as neces- 
sary links of thought, so as to constitute one self-con- 
sistent system of truth. Hence, he passes to the 
Rational consideration of the finite. Fichte's position 

* I use Fichte as chief representative of this school, though Hegel 
does not mention his name in this work. 



142 Philosophy of Religion. 

of the unity of the finite and the Infinite in subjective 
self-consciousness is the highest phase possible to 
reflection as the reason in understanding. The an- 
tithesis discovered by the understanding has finally 
been reduced to that of abstract identity. The finite 
and the Infinite are one. The God-consciousness is 
an indivisible part of my consciousness. I am naught 
without it, but it is also naught without me. The 
whole is subjective, within myself. In his Logic, 
Hegel shows the dialectic working upon this con- 
ception, exposing new discords and unities till the 
ultimate category of Spirit as absolute, self-con- 
scious intelligent personality is reached, the steepest, 
loftiest summit of thought (Die hochste, zugescharfste 
Spitze). Only with this conception of the Infinite 
can finite man be rightly, duly, and truly conceived. 
This is the work of his whole Logic. But here we 
can only note some of the most apparent steps in the 
process. 

In the assertion of the unity of the finite and the 
Infinite, the finite has not really been put in abeyance. 
I may say, in religious fervor, I am nothing; God 
is all, and yet, philosophically, I assert the finite I 
as the point where the Infinite comes to conscious- 
ness and exists. Such a finite is the highest form of 
untruth and evil. To rise above this standpoint the 
subjective, finite individual must be annulled in a 
real, self-existent absolute, in which alone he can 
realize his true being. This is the standpoint of 
speculative Reason, as well as that of Religion. 
Philosophy only presents this relation in the form of 
thought ; while religion, which is itself a sort of 
naive instinctive reason, presents it in the form of 
figurative conception. 



The Vital Idea of Religion. 143 

But this highest conception of reason is mediated 
by, passes through various partial statements. The 
Ego relates itself to another, which is seen to be 
more than a sensuous, and then more than an ab- 
stract Infinite. The demand is that it be in and for 
itself existent, or the Absolute, else I have only an 
empty, dead God. The demand is that it have ob- 
jective existence, though not that of objective, finite 
things, else were it finite itself. " But now comes 
the question as to how the subject is related in 
this infinite object. It is as thinking subject that 
it comes into relation with this recognized object. 
Thought is the activity of the universal, having a 
universal as object. In this case this universal must 
be the absolute. Consequently, it is thought that 
constitutes this relation with this absolute object. 
We make the transition from mere subjective to ob- 
jective thought." And we see that it is this absolute 
thought that is prior to, creative of, and the neces- 
sary ground and implication of, all finite thought. 

" In thinking — that is, in reflecting upon anything 
— I am subjective, have my thoughts about it ; where- 
as in thus thinking the thing itself, in thinking the 
thought of it, I withdraw my merely subjective rela- 
tion to it and enter into objective relation with it. 
I have annulled my subjective individuality, and 
raised myself to the universal point of view. This 
is the same thing as to think the universal as my 
object. I actually herein renounce the merely sub- 
jective point of view. In humility, or confession of 
my own finiteness, I enter the life and activity of the 
objective." * In thus thinking or cognizing the thing 

* Hegel's Philosophic der Religion, p. 190. 
14 



144 Philosophy of Religion. 

itself, or its thought, I pass beyond its mere phenome- 
nal form and pierce into its essence, or the logical 
conditions of its existence. Here I reach real neces- 
sar}' being, which is no longer merely an object for 
me. It has self-necessitated and therefore objective 
existence. My thought is valid only as it is thus 
freed from mere subjectivity and finds itself anew in 
the objective though ideal universe of real exist- 
ences. All such real being exists essentially sub specie 
ceternitatis, and is only thus truly known by me. It 
is to be noted that the essential attribute of thought 
is that it is a mediating activity and thus itself medi- 
ated universality. We can not follow closely this 
dialectic of thought which forces it to the universal 
and absolute as its goal. Limit after limit is annulled, 
till the true, objective, self-limiting Infinite is reached. 
All our knowledge rests upon at least the tacit ac- 
knowledgment of this ultimate standard. We only 
know our own knowledge to be subjective and finite 
because we have this infinite, absolute truth by which 
we measure it. To be conscious of such a limit, as 
that of finiteness or subjectivity, is virtually to have 
already transcended this limit. In pure thought this 
transcendence of such subjective limitations is clear- 
ly and definitely made, and we no longer think as 
mere individuals, but pass over and share in uni- 
versal thought or reason. This universal thought is 
not my own subjective creation, but that which really 
creates, sustains, explains, and gives partial worth to 
my thoughts. This presupposition of all knowledge 
is not clearly and definitely apprehended in all stages 
of knowledge. We pass through stages when it is 
even suicidally denied. But its very denial, if it is 
worth anything, appeals to it to prove itself. The 



The Vital Idea of Religion. 145 

denial of skepticism is really only the denial of some 
false, pictorial abstract or logical concept. This it 
denies only by tacit reference to and affirmation of a 
higher and truer universal or absolute. It is in its 
very denial mediated knowledge, or affirmation that 
comes through the negation of a negation. 

But to turn to the positive side again, we note 
that the mediating activity of thought may be over- 
looked, and we suppose that we know the Universal, 
or know God immediately. Really, however, this 
intuition in the subject is itself partly the result of 
many mediations, and only partly the result of the 
immediate activity of cognition. Nothing is further 
from Hegel's thought and method than pure a priori 
thinking. The inductive process goes pari passu 
with all thinking, and forms the mediation which 
leads to higher views. The a priori and a posteriori 
methods are united in every phase of knowing. 
That is, there is constant mediation and synthesis. 
Hegel is, of all men, least deserving of the reproach 
of being a merely a priori,, transcendental spinner of 
metaphysical cobwebs out of nothing but his own 
consciousness. Mediation is the essential element of 
his dialectic in which the a posteriori 'is seen to be but 
the a priori m the making, until the whole of experi- 
ence is seen in its concrete, ultimate form of organic 
Totality, which looks before and after, indissolubly, 
because rationally, connecting all. Thus he says we 
know God immediately, just as one- plays a very 
difficult piece of music, instinctively as it were, as 
the result of the mediation of much practicing it 
over and over. The same process of mediation also 
results in those habits which have become a second 
nature to us. The discovery of America by Colum- 



146 Philosophy of Religion. 

bus was the result of many actions and reflections.* 
The result of many mediations is that truths which 
we know to have been reached by a highly compli- 
cated and prolonged process of study, present them- 
selves to us finally as almost intuitive. The expert 
mathematician has ready-made intuitive solutions of 
problems which others can only understand after a 
long course of explanation. Thus mediated thought 
appears in us as immediate. In worshiping, God is 
present with me. The thought present in this is 
that of God for me. It is really a definite form of 
my being as pure thinking. I love myself in Him, 
and then find myself again as finite as distinguished 
from Him who is the infinite fullness of which ocean 
I am but a drop, and yet a real drop, a real finite 
being, though only real in Him. This finite is 
much higher than the abstract one reached in the 
stage of reflection. This true finite is seen to be an 
essential phase of the infinite in the nature of God, so 
that we might say that it is God who unitizes him- 
self in us. But this seems impious. Yet it is the 
same as the conception of God as the Creator of the 
world out of nothing but himself. The world thus 
becomes another than God and seems to limit, to 
finitize Him. But this is his own ^//"-limitation. It 
is his world, having its only real being in him. 
Having thus reached the true finite as opposed to the 
false one, we have now to distinguish between the 
true and the false infinite. 

(c.) Transition to the Speculative Idea of Religion. — 
The conception that we have reached of the true 
finite forces us to rise to a higher conception of the 

* Hegel's Philosophic der Religion, p. 191. 



The Vital Idea of Religion. 147 

Infinite. To merely say, God is infinite and I am 
finite, is a very inadequate and false proposition. As 
the finite is not merely the non-infinite, but has its 
real being in the infinite, we can not conceive of 
this infinite as an immobile, lifeless non-finite. The 
two terms can only be conceived as moments or or- 
ganic elements of a process. They are strictly cor- 
relative terms. God is not merely the infinite to 
the exclusion of the finite, as the finite is not merely 
finite to the exclusion of the infinite. We may and 
must distinguish, but can not absolutely separate the 
two without destroying both. They are parts of a 
system, which have no meaning when separated. In 
fact, we may say that we do not know anything ex- 
cept as in relations and ultimately as belonging to a 
system. The center of a circle is distinguished from, 
but is meaningless without the circumference, the 
positive pole in a battery without the negative, a 
cause without an effect, kings without subjects, par- 
ents without children. The eye is no eye apart 
from the body. " The single members of the body 
are what they are only in and through connection 
with their unity. A hand when hewn off from the 
body is a hand in name only, not in fact, as Aristotle 
observed.* We can speak of many of these relations 
between external things as necessary — i. e., the two 
terms are so intimately bound, the one to the other, 
so mutually and profoundly interpenetrative, that the 
changing or the suppression of the one is the chang- 
ing or suppression of the other. The kind of rela- 
tion that exists between things varies from merely 
external, mechanical, causal, chemical, vital, to spir- 

* Hegel's Logic, p. 310. 



148 Philosophy of Religion. 

itual connection. Each higher phase of relation is a 
mystery to the lower conception. Life is mysterious 
from the point of view of inorganic nature, and yet 
life is higher and explains, while it contains and trans- 
mutes the lower. The relation between parent and 
child is one of unity, of consubstantiality, especially 
when this relation takes the form of mutual love. So 
too, the terms finite and infinite are indefinable non- 
entities except as correlated. It is only the action of 
the mere reflective understanding that tries to define 
them as separate, and thus produces all those dis- 
cords and antinomies which it can not solve. 

Another indequate way of defining the Infinite is 
to attach to it certain notions or predicates formed 
from other material — our notions about God — calling 
them attributes. They are not derived from the es- 
sential nature of God. They are limited, and so 
come into collision. The Orientals were right in 
their feeling that this is not the true way to represent 
God. They say that he is " the many-named," and 
yet not thereby defined. The true attributes of God 
can not be these relative ones, they must be essen- 
tial.* Activity, Life, Spirit, Absolute Personality, 
are such essential attributes. He is the living God 
who in his essential living process creates and tran- 
scends the finite, and thus is in organic relation to it. 
Thus it might be said that without the world God 
is not God. That is, if it were possible to conceive 
a time when all the wisdom, and goodness, and 
justice, and love manifested in the world, lay dormant 
in the Divine Being, then were he less God than 
he is now — the motionless, dead Brahm of Oriental 

* Philosophic der Religion, II, 230. 



The Vital Idea of Religion. 149 

conception. The truth of this statement, however, 
can only be seen in the proper explication of the 
Christian doctrines of the Holy Trinity and the 
Creation. Plato and other Greek philosophers gave 
some hint of it in their doctrine of the limit (to Trepas). 
Limit gave chaos the order of cosmos, while lack of 
limit was lack of intelligence, order, law. The un- 
limited (to airetpov) was the indefinite, lawless, bad. 
" We must free ourselves from the bugbear of the 
opposition of the finite and the Infinite. This bug- 
bear is let loose upon those who desire to maintain 
that we can know God and have real communion 
with him. This is called pretentious arrogance, and 
much unction and irksome mock humility is used to 
decry it. Yet philosophy as well as religion main- 
tains this pretension." If we do not slay this agnostic 
phantom, we degrade the Infinite as well as the finite ; 
for it implies an impotence in the Infinite as well as 
in the finite. It says that God can not descend in 
relations with man. He must remain in himself in 
his powerlessness to get into the finite. " Every 
relative disability may be read in two ways : A dis- 
qualification in the nature of thought for knowing 
x, is from the other side a disqualification in the 
nature of x for being known. To say that the First 
Cause is wholly removed from our apprehension is 
not simply a disclaimer of faculty on our part ; it is, 
too, a charge of inability against the First Cause." * 

Jacobi very wittily characterized such an absolute 
as Kant's unknowable and unrevealable noumenon, or 
Ding an sick, as " enjoying a position of otium cum 
dignitate> which is the next thing to /Z07z-existence." 

* Martineau's Essays, I, I90. 



150 Philosophy of Religion. 

Thought as mere understanding can not know 
God. The faculty is inadequate. It is limited to 
the field of the finite. But the microscope need not 
deny the revelations of the telescope. The under- 
standing is not all of man as intelligence. It lives in 
a world where every term or product of thought pre- 
serves a stereotyped distinction from every other. 
It analyzes, separates, and defines everything and 
only unites them by abstracting from each its con- 
crete qualities. Its universals are mere abstractions, 
squeezing the life and characteristics out of every 
particular embraced. Indispensable as is its work, 
great as are its results — and no one appreciated the 
greatness of modern Science more than Hegel — it 
becomes mischievous and false when it poses as the 
ne plus ultra of human thought. " Reason, when fol- 
lowing the footsteps of the senses has short wings," 
says Dante. When following the understanding they 
are not yet developed enough for mounting the sky. 
The human spirit must not and can not restrict its 
observation to the sphere of the finite. In religion 
and philosophy there is a higher kind of experience 
claimed. Observation should sweep this field and 
compute results. Indeed, without accepting the tes- 
timony of the Spirit in this sphere also, the basis for 
knowledge in all lower spheres is taken away, and 
absolute, empirical skepticism is the latent and logi- 
cal result. The ground of religion can not then be 
found on the standpoint of external observation. 
The observer must observe himself as in relation to 
the thing observed. In religion and philosophy he 
must therefore observe himself as essentially corre- 
lated with the Infinite. This is what speculative or 
comprehensive thought does. The observer here 



The Vital Idea of Religion. 151 

sees the finite and the Infinite in organic unity. He 
himself is in this unity, and sees it in seeing him- 
self as thus essentially related to it. He sees the 
totality in comprehensive view. This is the stand- 
point of the infinite observation, and of the Idea, the 
sphere in which the true idea of religion finds its 
explanation and justification. 

3. The Speculative Idea of Religion. — Reason is the 
ground upon which alone religion is at home. As 
speculative idea it is the rational explication of what 
is involved in the religious relation between God 
and man. Reason (Vernunff) is thus the faculty of 
the Infinite, as reason {Ver stand) is that of the finite. 
The former is the faculty of insight into the life of 
organisms permeating, developing, and unifying all 
parts so as to make them very and essential mem- 
bers of the organism. What it thus grasps together 
and sees to be self-developing from the idea of the 
thing, the latter, or the faculty of outsight, sees as 
separate, contingent, and contradictory, at best only 
mechanically related and bound together. The 
former sees the process of the self-development of 
the totality through the forms of sense and under- 
standing, keeps its eye upon the whole throughout, 
and finds the concrete whole at the end. It sees the 
idea produce the whole in all its diversity. It sees, 
too, its own self in every phase of the idea. It finds 
itself at home everywhere in the intelligent universe. 
Reason thus making man at home, showing him his 
own larger self, in the ever-widening circle of experi- 
ence, frees him from all finite limitations and neces- 
sity, and brings him to full self-consciousness. Hegel 
uses the term consciousness to express the phenomenal 
side of mind in knowing external things. Thus I 



152 



Philosophy of Religion. 



am conscious of, feel, see, know relations to external 
things not myself. But intelligent spirit or reason 
refuses to be a stranger or alien anywhere in the 
intelligent world. It may "take the wings of the 
morning and fly to the uttermost part of the earth," 
and even there it finds only intelligence, spirit, 
which is its own truer and larger self. The more it 
goes out of itself the more it finds itself. Its heart 
is restless until it rests in God. In every act of 
conscious intelligence, self finds itself more and 
more adequately realized, and thus becomes self- 
consciousness. But the real presupposition and inspi- 
ration of all knowledge is not my consciousness of 
myself as individual, limited by external things, but 
thought, or a self-consciousness, which is beyond all 
individual selves. It is the Absolute Self-conscious- 
ness, which the conscious life of all finite minds im- 
plies, and in finding which our consciousness becomes 
self-consciousness in the fullest sense of the word. 

This comprehension translates all relations into 
which we come into j^-relations, all determinism 
into ^^/"-determinism, all necessity into freedom, all 
chance into Providence, and all Providence into in- 
telligence. When God is cognized as Him in whom 
we live and move and have our real being, when He 
is recognized within the soul, we come to full self- 
consciousness. The Philosophy of religion is the 
rational explication of this self-consciousness, or of 
the essential and immanent relation of God and man. 
I give this exposition of the general way in which 
Hegel uses these two terms — consciousness and self- 
consciousness — as preliminary to a crucial paragraph. 
As it is both difficult and pregnant, I translate it as 
literally as possible : 



The Vital Idea of Religion. 153 

We have hitherto used the term consciousness to express 
the phenomenal side of the spirit, the essential relation of 
knowing and its object. In this I am determined by rela- 
tions to objects. But the essential of spirit is not to be 
merely in such relations. Such consciousness is the sphere 
of the finite, and in it everything is itself and not another. 
But Spirit or concrete reason is not merely such knowl- 
edge, where the being of the objects is thus separated from 
the knowledge itself. It does not exist merely in relations 
or under this form of consciousness. It is in making ab- 
straction of this relation that we speak of the spirit, and 
consciousness then becomes a phase or element in the being 
of spirit. We have thus an affirmative relation of the spirit 
to the Absolute Spirit. It is first in this identity that the 
cognizing spirit posits itself for itself in its object. This 
constitutes spirit or reason, which is its own object. Re- 
ligion is thus the relation of spirit or reason with the Abso- 
lute Spirit or Reason. It is only thus that the spirit knows 
its knowledge (i. e., the cognizing spirit is the unity of the 
subject and its object). This is not merely the spirit put- 
ting itself in relation with the Absolute Spirit, but it is the 
Absolute Spirit himself relating himself to himself in that 
which we in consciousness posited as something separate 
and distinct. Thus religion is, in a higher way, the Idea 
(Idee) of the Spirit, who of himself relates himself to him- 
self, or it is the self-consciousness of the Absolute Spirit. 
This contains consciousness as an organic element. Con- 
sciousness as such is finite, the knowing of an object distinct 
from self. Religion is also consciousness (knows God as 
external, transcendent), and thus contains the finite con- 
sciousness, but contains it absorbed (as the tree contains 
the seed). For the object which the Absolute Spirit knows 
is himself. He is only Absolute Spirit as knowing nothing 
but himself. Finiteness of consciousness is the result of 
spirit distinguishing itself from its object. But this is a 
real element of spirit. It is the spirit itself which makes 






154 Philosophy of Religion. 

this distinction, or posits itself as determined by its object. 
It is only by this mediation (through consciousness or 
finite spirit), by which it finitizes itself, that it comes to 
knowledge of itself or to self-consciousness. Thus religion 
is the knowledge which the Divine Spirit has of himself, 
through the mediation of the finite spirit. Consequently, in 
the absolute Idea (Idee) religion is not the work of a man, 
but it is essentially the highest determination of the Abso- 
lute Idea himself. . . . The Absolute Spirit in his conscious- 
ness is self-knowing, self-conscious. If he knew aught else, 
he would cease to be Absolute Spirit. This makes his 
knowledge absolute truth, and the whole of truth. It em- 
braces all the riches of the natural and the spiritual worlds. 
It is their sole substance and truth. In it the truth of 
everything exists as a dynamic element.* 

What have we here ? This question will come to 
every one reading this quotation for the first time, 
without having thought himself fully into Hegel's 
meaning. It is so different from current conceptions 
of religion, that it may be dismissed with a smile as 
foggy metaphysics, or at best as pantheism. That it 
is neither, but contains the ultimate speculative com- 
prehension of absolute religion ; that it only puts in 
rational form the highest Christian theology and the 
profoundest Christian mysticism, I shall endeavor to 
show in brief manner. 

But, first, let me epitomize the few remaining 
pages of this section of Hegel's work. This demon- 
stration of the organic relation of the Infinite and 
the finite is the true content of religion, the self- 
necessitated development of thought starting from 
the immediate content of the religious conscious- 

* Philosophic der Religion, vol. i, pp. 199-201. 



The Vital Idea of Religion. 155 

ness. The course of thought is shown in another 
way in the Logic. There beginning is made with 
mere being or nothing, and the tremendous labor 
of thought is observed as it develops the implicit 
relations of each lower category until absolute Spirit 
is reached as the Ultimate — that is, as to point of 
departure, but really primal, implied in the lowest 
category. Thought is thus seen to necessarily make 
passage from mere Being, or the finite world (Being — 
the most abstract and general term to express all 
finite existence) to its absolute presupposition, or 
God. What is reached in the Logic, as a process of 
thought, we found to be held naively as a moment 
in the religious consciousness from which we started 
in the Philosophy of Religion. What we have now 
reached is God as the Absolute First, and the course 
of thought in the Logic is seen to be the activity of 
the Idea of Absolute Spirit in itself. Mere being, the 
finite world, is the activity of this spirit positing an 
object for itself, making an " other " for itself. But 
this " other " moves itself back to its source, its home. 
It is met more than half-way. Spirit recognizes its 
"other" as itself. This activity constitutes the Di- 
vine life: 1, is the Idea in itself; 2, is its own self- 
posited " other " ; 3, is the denial that this " other " is 
absolutely an " other " ; and the recognition that "it " 
is itself. This Divine self-activity is only adequately 
stated in the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, which is 
fully explicated in Part III. 

The doctrine of creation, and of the relation of 
nature and man to the Creator, is vitally connected 
with that of the triune nature of God. It belongs 
to his nature to create. Creation is God's positing 
an " other " which is not an " other." The creation 



156 Philosophy of Religion, 

is his, belongs to his being or essence. This involves 
the finite as his own self-posited object and self-reve- 
lation. It is necessary for God to create. Love, says 
Hegel, is only another expression of the eternally 
Triune God. Love must create and love " another." 
But, in loving this " other," God is only loving him- 
self. 

Spirit lives by difference, but still always finds 
itself in all its differences. Thus Spirit is, to use 
popular language, the Absolute Unity of the spiritual 
and the natural. Finite consciousness, to which God 
appears as an object, is itself only a self-posited phase 
of the Divine activity. But as this appearance or 
object, he is appearing to himself — coming unto his 
own. The recognition that finite consciousness has 
of God is, from another point of view, only God's 
own self-recognition, taking back this consciousness 
as an element of his own self-consciousness. " God 
was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself' 
(2 Cor. v, 19). The world of finite spirit has only 
truth and reality so far as it is thus annulled and 
taken back into God. The truth of all finite exist- 
ence is thus not an immediate form of actuality, but 
of ideality, that wherein it recognizes itself and is rec- 
ognized as an element of, as at-one-with, the Absolute 
Spirit. But these two moments of finite conscious- 
ness, its annulment in its fulfillment, may be consid- 
ered separately. 

In consciousness the Divine object appears as 
phenomenality or representation, on the theoretical 
side. The practical side is the fulfilling annulment 
of the separation. Here freedom, subjectivity as 
such, enters, and we have the process to self-con- 
sciousness to observe. It is this phase that consti- 



The Vital Idea of Religion, 157 

tutes the Cultus, the field in which atonement and 
reconciliation are achieved. 

C. Cultus, or Public Worship. 

The text of which this section is an explication, 
is reconciliation with God through the double but 
mutually involved action of Divine grace and human 
self-sacrifice. That is, it is the death of the old man 
and the birth of the new man accomplished through 
religion rather than through morality. 

The first phase of Worship is faith, or the drawing 
near of the soul unto God. Formal faith comes 
through external means, through hearing the voice 
of God in the Bible, creeds, sermons, and services of 
the Church. But these must be merely the means 
for the begetting the higher form of personal faith 
which is known as "the testimony of the Spirit." 
Worship is a giving and a receiving, a giving up of 
self and a receiving of God, that the ideal self may 
thereby be realized. Morality can never affect this, 
which is the very essence of religion. At-one-ment 
of man with God is both fully realized and symbol- 
ized in the highest act of religious worship, while in 
morality there is always that ineffectual struggle 
that St. Paul depicts so graphically and piteously in 
the seventh chapter of his Epistle to the Romans. 

Our striving after living communion with God 
culminates in self-surrender to him who is mighty 
to save. This is met by the divine gift and opera- 
tion, which is received and enjoyed by us : 

Worship is thus a double-sided activity. It is a religious 
act or sacrifice on my part, and the means of the Divine act 
of grace, a means of imparting grace which I receive and 



158 Philosophy of Religion. 

enjoy. God's act may seem to overpower my freedom, but 
my true freedom consists in the knowledge and will of God 
(whose service is perfect freedom). And this can only 
come with the surrender of my own subjective knowledge 
and will. In this divine activity man seems a passive mate- 
rial, like a stone. The divine grace is to come to pass in me 
and through me. My giving up myself and receiving divine 
grace is my own act, and at the same time God's act, so 
that " it is no longer I that live, but God that liveth in me " 
(Gal. ii, 20). I have to open myself to the incoming of 
the Spirit in order that I may be spiritual. This act of 
worship is at one and the same time my act and God's act. 
This paradoxical truth of the religious experience is cer- 
tainly opposed to the merely moral standpoint of self-reali- 
zation as held by Kant and Fichte. To morality the good 
is an unrealized something in a God-forsaken world, an 
ideal which the categorical imperative lays upon my sub- 
jective human will to realize. Thus the circle of moral 
activity is limited. In religion, on the contrary, the good, 
the reconciliation, is absolutely accomplished.* 

I have translated this page from the section on 
Cultus, as presenting the very core of the Christian 
doctrine of salvation, and as illustrating, as a legiti- 
mate outcome, Hegel's "speculative idea of religion." 

The finest chapter in Principal Caird's volume is 
that in which he interprets and illustrates this whole 
section with incomparable skill and appreciation (Phi- 
losophy of Religion, Chapter IX). It is the work of 
a disciple scarcely less original and subtle than that 
of the master, that I gladly refer to as a type of thor- 
ough assimilation and independent interpretation of 
Hegel. 

* Philosophic der Religion, vol. ii, p. 222. 



CHAPTER V. 

THEOLOGY, ANTHROPOLOGY, AND PANTHEISM. 

Let us now return to the query raised by the 
passage quoted from Hegel : What have we here ? * 

We reply that we have — i. The highest form of 
theology, justifying to thought in terms of thought the 
deliverances of the religious consciousness of inspired 
writers and of Christian saints, theologians, and mys- 
tics of all ages. 

2. We have a First Principle, adequate to origi- 
nate and explain to thought in terms of thought all the 
phenomena of the world of nature and finite spirit 
and their fulfilling implications. 

3. We have not pantheism. 

I. First, we have here the highest theology in 
terms of thought. Religion is not content until it 
rises to the lofty conviction and apprehends the 
working whereby God is able to subdue all things 
unto himself, " of whom and through whom and to 
whom are all things." The religious saints have 
strained language to the utmost to express this abso- 
lute wisdom and power and goodness of God. God 
is, and is to be, " all in all." This is the goal of Chris- 
tianity, the religion of reconciliation and of the con- 
summation of all things. So, too, philosophy is not 

*P. 154. 



160 Philosophy of Religion, 

content until it apprehend the ultimate synthesis of 
the totality — God, man, and the world. It, too, is 
restless till it rests in absolute Thought, in absolute 
Personality, as the very zenith of its self-necessitated 
flight. Thus in philosophy, whose whole object is to 
show reason in religion, religion finds its justification 
from the standpoint of thinking consciousness. Un- 
sophisticated piety may have no need of this. It 
possesses the true content in other form, and may 
fail to recognize it when thus translated into terms 
of thought. What is left of my religion in this phi- 
losophy it may ask. But this question springs from 
a misunderstanding of the difference between phi- 
losophy and religion. They have the same content, 
but in different form. The common form of religion 
is that of feeling and representation, while philosophy 
is that of thought. It is the same content which 
develops and repeats itself in feeling, imagination, 
and thought. But thought, thinking representation, 
thinks it into the form of philosophy or theology, 
thus transforming it for its own cognition. Feeling 
and imagination pass over and are immanent in this 
form. The philosopher becomes neither unfeeling 
nor unimaginative. Thought does this for itself and 
also for religion, so far as it seeks intellectual expres- 
sion. It may mean much or nothing to the devout 
soul as an intricate mathematical demonstration may 
mean much or nothing to a pupil. Every science 
has its own object, and must have its own disciples. 
Philosophy has for its object the demonstration to 
thought in terms of thought of the absolute synthetic 
unity of all phenomena. The reproach, then, that is 
made against theology as well as philosophy, that 
they do not give back religion in its pictorial form, 



Theology, Anthropology, and Pantheism, 161 

is senseless. The " abstruse terminology " is needed 
for higher conceptions of the rational speculative 
comprehension of what really is in religion. Thus 
depicted, only " gray in gray," religion may seem to 
lack real flesh and blood vitality. But for thought, 
the new language interprets the new and higher 
conceptions, which can not be adequately expressed 
for it in terms of the lower ones. Thought has 
been forced to organically correlate what common 
thought holds as separate and distinct. It has been 
forced to its ultimate presupposition of the organ- 
ic unity of the Infinite and finite, as absolute self- 
consciousness, Hegel's First Principle is God as this 
Absolute Personality — the votjctis z/oT/o-e©? of Aris- 
totle, only developed in concrete and systematic 
form : 

The true First Principle, which Hegel knows under the 
name of Idea (Idee), and Aristotle calls vot/o-is rj kolO* avrrjv 
or evepyeia y koB avrrfv (which the scholastics translate Actus 
Pur us), is God as Self-Conscious Reason. Subject and 
object of himself, Nature is his product as creator, and the 
world of progressive intelligent beings is his Image. This 
statement is odious to some who style themselves "scien- 
tific/' for the reason that they are still obliged to be on the 
alert lest their dogmatism fall back into the mere implicit 
faith of Religion— an issue to be guarded against with all 
caution. But the strictest and severest logical procedure, 
-followed out to its result, will inevitably lead to this Con- 
crete First Principle — the Recognizing Reason. Mechani- 
cal cause (Matter) presupposes dynamical cause (Force), 
and this again presupposes Final Cause (the Ideal totality) 
as its condition ; Final Cause presupposes Free Intelligence 
— self-determining and realizing — as its condition ; and this 
presupposes only itself, and hence all dialectic ends here at 



1 62 Philosophy of Religion. 

the First True and Concrete, the Highest Principle, and 
this is Personality.* 

Hegel himself has elsewhere declared : 

The highest, steepest summit is the Pure Personality, 
which alone, through the absolute dialectic forming its na- 
ture, includes and holds all in itself, for the reason that it 
elevates itself to Freedom. 

Here we have a category that holds the totality 
of conditions self-posited, with no external "other" 
to condition it. Here the mechanical and fatalistic 
conception passes in ethical harmony into the high- 
est freedom of perfect self-determination. At the 
same time it only annuls by explaining and realizing 
all lower categories or conceptions as self-posited 
moments of itself. Its true content is not the ab- 
stract isolated Personality of mere deism, but the 
systematic whole, the parts of which are falsely 
grasped as absolute fragments by the lower concep- 
tions of nature, law, and necessity. " The Absolute 
Idea may thus be compared to the old man who 
utters the same religious propositions as the child, 
but for whom they are pregnant with the significance 
of a lifetime. The interest lies in the whole experi- 
ence." f Again : 

When we hear the Idea spoken of, we need not imagine 
something far away beyond this mortal sphere. The Idea 
is rather what is completely present ; and it is found in 
every consciousness, although it may be in an indistinct 
and stunted form. We conceive the world to ourselves as 
a great totality, which is created by God, and so created 

* Dr. W. T. Harris, Journal of Speculative Philosophy, October, 1869. 
f The Logic, p. 234. 



Theology, Anthropology, and Pantheism. 163 

that in it God has manifested himself to us. We regard the 
world also as ruled by Divine Providence : implying that 
the division between the parts of the world is continually 
brought back, and made conformable, to the unity from 
which it has issued. The purpose of philosophy has always 
been to know the Idea by thought ; and everything deserv- 
ing the name of philosophy has constantly been based on 
the consciousness of an absolute unity, where the under- 
standing sees and accepts only separation.* 

Again : " This Absolute Idea is the unity of the 
theoretical (cognitive) and the practical (willing), and 
at the same time the unity of life with cognition." + 
In this First Principle, then, we have the absolute 
self-conscious life of reason and will — physically and 
metaphysically free, but morally necessitated — the 
necessity of Divine Love. We have the immanent 
Deity — at home in all his creation and not merely the 
supermundane deity, the Deus ex machina, who can 
only occasionally thrust his hand into the web of 
human affairs from behind the clouds. Too many 
Christians have accepted at the hands of deists this 
unethical conception of God. He is "the fullness 
that filleth all things " (Eph. i, 19), from whose pres- 
ence nor man nor devil can escape. He is a God 
here and now, not merely then and there. No need to 
go "beyond the sea" or "up into the heavens" to 
find him, for the " heaven of heavens " can not con- 
tain him. He is omnipresent, the onine scibile of all 
existence. 

Telescope and microscope may not find him, be- 
cause he is so " nigh thee, even in thy heart and in 
thy mouth." 

* The Logic, p. 306. f Ibid., p. 321. 



164 Philosophy of Religion. 






Speak to him thou, for he hears, and spirit with spirit can 

meet ; 
Closer is he than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet. 

He is not merely something outside and beyond 
our conscious feeling and thought of him. He is 
above but also below, without but also within ; as 
St. Hildebert sings : 

Super cuncta, subter cuncta ; 
Extra cuncta, intra cuncta ; 
Intra cuncta, nee inclusus ; 
Extra cuncta, nee exclusus ; 
Super totus, praesidendo, 
Subter totus, sustinendo ; 
Extra totus, complectendo, 
Intra totus in complendo. 

The " heaven of heavens " can not contain him, 
how much less " this house " — the order, beauty, and 
life of Nature, the constitution and capacities of the 
human soul, ail the large movements of human his- 
tory — the whole rejoicing and groaning creation 

... the light of setting suns, 
And the round ocean and the living air, 
And the blue sky and the mind of man. 

" Is it not effrontery," asks Lotze, " to narrow 
down the Spirit of the universe to a series of events 
upon this planet ? " God is not only immanent, he 
is also transcendent. Hegel holds with Aristotle that 
" the world has its principle in God, and this princi- 
ple exists not merely as a form immanent in the 
world, like the order in an army, but also as an ab- 
solute self-existent substance, like a general in an 



Theology, Anthropology, and Pantheism, 165 

army."* Only Hegel substitutes for substance the 
full concrete Christian conception of subject. Hegel 
never tires of recalling and emphasizing this most 
vital distinction for Theism. It is that which differ- 
entiates his conception, as he constantly affirms, from 
Pantheism, and is absolutely required for proper 
Personality in the Godhead. 

To doubt that Hegel means all that inspired writ- 
ers and Christian saints and theologians and mystics 
ascribe to God in their most ecstatic moments of 
rapt devotion, is to doubt his plainest, oft-repeated, 
and always implied assertion. But this is not all that 
Hegel does. He maintains that Personality neces- 
sarily involves the triune nature of God. He rightly 
regards the doctrine of the Holy Trinity as the vital 
center of all Christian doctrine — the essential truth 
in the light of which alone it is possible to know 
God and to understand the meaning of nature and 
human history. It alone supplies all the conditions 
requisite for the absolute free personality of God, 
which issues in his creation of nature, and of man in 
his own image. Hegel thus makes religion imma- 
nent in the triune nature of God himself, finding in 
the mutual interplay of the three persons in the God- 
head the absolute form of love, communion, atone- 
ment— that is, the essence of religion. This is what 
he means when he says : " Thus religion is, in a 
higher way, the Idea of the Spirit, who of himself 
relates himself to himself, or it is the 5^-conscious- 
ness of the Absolute Spirit." From Divine Person- 
ality thus constituted issues the might of creative 
love — a creation free and yet morally necessitated by 

* Uebervveg's History of Philosophy, vol. i, p. 163. 



1 66 Philosophy of Religion, 

the Divine love. Further, he says that " Religion is 
the knowledge that the Divine Spirit has of himself, 
through the mediation of the finite spirit." That is, 
God in loving man loves only himself. On the other 
hand, his children in knowing and loving God are 
only truly knowing and loving themselves — their 
true eternal selves. Again, it may be said our lov- 
ing God is only God's loving himself, "reconciling 
the world unto himself," taking back this human love 
and worship as an element of his own self-conscious- 
ness. The two sides of this truth may be thus stated 
in paradoxical form, without swamping the true Per- 
sonality of either God or man, and at the same time 
repelling that separation that is sometimes conceived 
to exist between these organic elements in the divine 
life and creation. Hegel's language here can easily 
be paralleled by that of numberless sainted writers. 

To Part III also belongs the vindication by Hegel 
of all the vital Christian conceptions and doctrines 
concerning God, his attributes, creation, revelation, 
and his Church. I have said enough to show that 
Hegel does not ascribe less to God than the pro- 
foundest theologians and devoutest saints. The con- 
tention, however, is likely to be that he ascribes too 
much to God — that his Absolute absorbs and destroys 
personality, freedom, and immortality. Jealousy for 
man's place and worth may ignorantly attack Hegel's 
conception of God. Thus Prof. Seth seems to fall 
back from Hegel's lofty ontology because it is incon- 
sistent with the antiquated conception of freedom 
held by Libertarians, Pelagians, and Arminians. " I 
have," he says, " a center of my own — a will of my 
own, which no one shares with me or can share — a 
center which I maintain even in my dealings with 



Theology, Anthropology \ and Pantheism. 167 

God himself." God is warned not to tread upon the 
holy ground of the individual will without first put- 
ting off his shoes. 

The English Hegelians prefer to call themselves 
Neo-Kantians, followers in " the path opened out by 
Kant, and further explored by Kant's successors," 
especially by Hegel. Some of the younger members 
of the school published a volume of Essays in Philo- 
sophical Criticism, dedicated to the memory of Thomas 
Hill Green, the leader of the Oxford circle, with a pref- 
ace by Prof. Edward Caird, of Glasgow. Without ex- 
ception they all, as well as older members of the same 
school, like Principal Caird and Prof. W. Wallace, 
attribute this profound Theism to Hegel. Mr. R. B. 
Haldane has, however, so far lapsed from Philosophy 
into Kantian Agnosticism as to criticise Hegel and 
Prof. Green for having any ontology and theology 
in their system. He esteems " the teaching us how 
to criticise our categories " to be the chief and last- 
ing work of Hegel. Kant was right in " declining 
to identify the logical unity of thought with a divine 
or creative self," and Hegel was wrong in making 
this identification, though " he was under no greater 
necessity of making the identification," or "to iden- 
tify this ideal with Divine Existence." But he did do 
so, as also did Prof. T. H. Green. Instead of confin- 
ing the work to mere criticism of the categories, they 
did " transform the theory of knowledge into a meta- 
physic of existence, or absolute Philosophy, in which 
a transcendental Self, w^hich for this theory has no 
meaning except as the implicate of all experiences is 
first hypostatized into an Absolute Subject and pres- 
ently into an Absolute Cause." " But," says Haldane, 
criticising this, " all that is, is for knowledge " — not 
16 



1 68 Philosophy of Religion. 

either for an individual or an Absolute Subject. All 
that can be done, he affirms, is to stick to the criti- 
cal method and criticise our categories. But knowl- 
edge can not be for nobody, nor can criticism of the 
categories be aught but arbitrary and fanciful with- 
out some standard of comparison. Prof. Erdmann, 
the venerable orthodox exponent of Hegel, well says, 
" The problem of all Science — i. e., to recognize Rea- 
son in the different spheres — can be solved only when 
one knows, first, what Reason is, and, secondly, how 
to find it " ; * and affirms that Hegel identifies Rea- 
son with the creative self-conscious subject God. 

Prof. Seth, who now criticises Hegel's and Green's 
Theism from the standpoint of individualism (i. e., 
knowledge is for somebody for the individual and de 
intellectibus non disputanduni), says that " surely He- 
gel's system was to its author from beginning to end 
an ontology or metaphysic of existence," and " Hegel 
would have contemptuously tossed aside any theory 
that professed to do less." Criticism of categories is 
not the whole of philosophy, and it shirks its true 
task if it does not in some way identify thought and 
Being. If the Self-conscious Subject of Hegel is the 
ultimate category of thought, then we must use it as 
our best key to the ultimate nature of existence as a 
whole. As Mr. D. G. Ritchie says, " If the theologi- 
cal question has to be raised, and it can not well be 
avoided, the Idealist may at least claim the same 
right to use the name of God for the ultimate princi- 
ple of the universe, which is assumed by every hot- 
gospeller, who talks about God as he might do about 
* the man in the next street.' " Certainly, as Mr. 

* Erdmann's Geschichte der Philosophic, vol. ii, p. 559. 



Theology, Anthropology, and Pantheism. 169 

Ritchie suggests, the Idealism of Hegel seems at 
least to render explicable, as no other theory does, 
why some of the world's greatest minds have held 
certain theological doctrines, which, though to the 
logic of "common sense," they appear as senseless 
ravings, can assimilate any results that Science may 
attain and yet make explicable the most mystical 
theology. Such a theory is at least as worthy of 
consideration as Deism, Agnosticism, or Materialism. 

Prof. Seth, we have recently quoted * as protest- 
ing against Hegel for ascribing too much to God, in 
his lofty ontology. He betrays a jealousy of God 
rather than for God. He is jealous for his own indi- 
viduality, not for human personality as personalized 
by God, which is really Hegel's conception. He 
warns God off from that inviolable holy ground of 
the subjective individual self. 

II. In noticing this objection, we turn to our sec- 
ond point. We have here a First Principle adequate 
to originate and explain to thought, in terms of 
thought, the world of nature and finite spirit, and 
their fulfilling implications. We may omit reference 
to nature, and only consider the place accorded or 
left to man under Hegel's view of God. 

No one that I have ever read maintains so stanchly 
as Hegel the full, rich, eternal content of human per- 
sonality. But no one wars more strenuously than 
he does against the one-sided subjective and abstract 
individualism so prevalent in the eighteenth century, 
which is even to-day the bane of much philosophy 
and sectarian Christianity. His whole philosophy 



* Cf. the English quarterly, Mind, Nos. 1, Hi, liii, for these references 
to Haldane, Ritchie, and Seth. 



170 Philosophy of Religion, 

may be said to be a protest against such atomic in- 
dividualism as makes objective catholic truth impos- 
sible, and lands its upholders in agnosticism and 
pessimism. His whole conception of the true con- 
crete qualitative Infinite as opposed to the abstract 
quantitative one, of the organic relation of the true 
Infinite and finite, is as much to vindicate and real- 
ize the infinite capacity of man, as it is to give the 
Infinite real concrete fullness of being. The Infi- 
nite is the necessary presupposition of the finite, in 
relation with which it alone can have and realize its 
being. Seth's contention, however, seems to be for 
the mere independent individual, apart not only from 
the Infinite but also apart from relation to the social 
organism. All reality and all knowledge, he says, is 
for the individual self, not for the universal self or 
consciousness, which he calls merely a logical ab- 
straction. " Each self is a unique existence, which 
is perfectly impervious, if I may so speak, to other 
selves — impervious in a fashion of which the impene- 
trability of matter is a faint analogue." But denying 
a social, and finally a universal reality, involves all 
our experience in a contradiction. Such a principle 
of unity, such an all-embracing reality, is at least 
necessary to any cosmos of science or philosophy of 
man. Grant for the moment that it is a fiction of 
thought. It is at least a necessary fiction— one with- 
out which all thought is impossible. Such is the ver- 
dict of all philosophical theory of knowing. Kant's 
Transcendental Ego may be denied real existence, 
but its necessity for thought can not even be ques- 
tioned. To deny that we can ever get out of our 
selves, or that anything outside of our impervious 
selves can get into us, is to deny that we can in 



Theology, Anthropology, and Pantheism. 171 

thought transcend our own individuality and enter 
into a world of real reality that embraces and binds 
together all thinkers and all objects of thought. The 
real presupposition of all knowledge is not the indi- 
vidual's subjective consciousness, but a thought or 
self - consciousness, which is beyond all individual 
thought, which thinks in and through individuals — a 
thought which can not be a mere subjective notion 
or conception, but which carries with it the proof of 
its' own necessary existence or reality. 

The maintenance of sheer individuality may avoid 
Pantheism, and then arbitrarily posit a Deus ex ma- 
china which individualism soon reduces to the great 
Unknown and Unknowable, and ends in Agnosticism. 
It is true that the reality and worth of the individual 
must be stanchly maintained as the Alpha and Omega 
of ethics. Free self-conscious action, but regulated 
by infinite absolute law instead of arbitrary subject- 
ive caprice, is the very heart of morality. Any the- 
ory which makes man to be determined by any arbi- 
trary external non-congenial power, or that reduces 
him to a mere cog in a huge machine that must move 
when and how and whither the crank turns, can not 
be too strongly condemned. 

But here the term personality is much more ap- 
propriate and significant than the term individuality. 
An individual is, strictly speaking, an undividable, 
inseparate atom. Individuus is the Latin for the 
arofws of Democritus. But there is no such thing 
within man's knowledge. Even Seth acknowledges 
that " the mere individual is a fiction of philosophic 
thought" and "an abstraction of logic." Individu- 
ality, says Bain also, consists in "a conflux of gen- 
eralities." We can no more conceive of such an 



1 72 Philosophy of Religion. 

individual man, " who has not sucked at the breast 
of the universal Ethos," without ancestry and social 
relations, than we can conceive of a tree without soil 
and air and light. The so-called individual is a whole 
complex of hereditary and environing elements, held 
together in one consciousness, which itself is as dif- 
ferentiated as these elements. The whole precedes 
and environs all such individuals. They are only of 
absolute value as thus participant in an intelligent, 
social, and rational world. It is not the actual but 
the ideal individual that is of worth. It is this ideal 
individual which appears not as something ready 
made, but something which develops by living into 
the larger life about it ; not something isolated and 
opposed to the world and humanity, but that which 
receives them into its own circle, loses its own life in 
them, in order to live its own life. Subjective indi- 
vidual freedom from all limits and relations really 
means inability to act at all. Freedom in vacuo is 
motionless. Forms of activity are objective. The 
individual must go out of himself to be himself. De- 
nuded of external limits, relations, and duties, he is 
without form and void. So, too, there is no merely 
individual self-consciousness. Even in his simplest 
act of consciousness, not-self is one of the factors. 
Consciousness overlaps both the ego and the non-ego. 
An eternal omnipresent not-self is necessary to real 
self-consciousness. Altruism is complemental to ego- 
ism. Both are parts of every self-conscious individ- 
ual's life. Shut up the individual from others, and 
he finds no '* other " to nourish his own life. He must 
have at least some low sky against which to strike 
his sublime head, in order to know that he has a head. 
But man, as such a progressively realizing self, is 



Theology, Anthropology, and Pantheism, i y$ 

differentiated from the abstract individual by being 
a person. A person, at least, is the quality of being 
an object to itself in relation to other persons and 
things. He finds himself, is at home in all the larger 
life about him. A native-born Robinson Crusoe on 
his island might be an individual, he could not be a 
person. Society is to the person what language is to 
thought. Unus homo nullus homo. Multiply your 
relations, and you increase yourself ; minimize them, 
and you dwarf even to annihilation. It is in the ob- 
jective ethical world of social relations of family, so- 
ciety, state, and church, that the individual attains 
ethical personality. He is relatively complete only in 
this social life. Man is by nature not an individual, 
but a social being {ttoKltucov %oov), and can realize his 
personality only because it is as social that he realizes 
himself. To live his own life, he must live the life 
which is not merely his own, and yet is most em- 
phatically his own. The individual must die, in order 
that the person may live in an organism of persons. 
The external duties to family, neighbors, and state 
are his own duties ; the welfare of these is his own 
welfare. Living for others is the highest form of 
living by others. Die to live is the ultimate law of all 
life. The objective social laws exist as an external 
must, as forced necessities to the individual, while to 
the person they exist as a personal categorical imper- 
ative. The person is autonomous, gives these ethical 
laws to himself. Thus the subjective penetrates and 
lives in the objective, the individual in the relatively 
universal. Enthusiasm of humanity is enthusiasm for 
self, and self-realization is labor for the welfare of 
humanity. Thus the largest altruism is the truest 
egoism, and genuine self-culture is genuine philan- 



1 74 - Philosophy of Religion. 






thropy. The egoistic individual does not thus rec- 
ognize and interpret all external obligations to family 
and neighbors as his duties, does not impose them 
upon himself, while the ethical person does. Apart 
from the fulfillment of these duties, the person knows 
that he is not himself. Mere selfish, individual pleas- 
ure becomes real self-denial to the larger self of per- 
sonality. We know, in theory at least, how we might 
thus realize ourselves, by transcending while fulfilling 
the relations of narrower spheres, until we enter the 
largest cosmopolitan life of humanity and become the 
thoroughly socialized person. Prof. Green says very 
finely that we have reached — 

that stage in which the educated citizen of Christendom 
is able to think of the perfect life as essentially conditioned 
by the exercise of virtues, resting on a self-sacrificing will, 
in which it is open to all men to participate, and as fully at- 
tainable by one man, only in so far as through those virtues 
it is attained by all. In thinking of ultimate good he 
thinks of it, indeed, necessarily as perfection for himself j 
as a life in which he shall be fully satisfied through having 
become all that the spirit within enables him to become. 
But he can not think of himself as satisfied in any life 
other than a social life> exhibiting the exercise of self-deny- 
ing will, and in which " the multitude of the redeemed," 
which is all men, shall participate. He has other faculties, 
indeed, than those which are directly exhibited in the spe- 
cifically moral virtues — faculties which find their expression 
not in his dealings with other men, but in the arts and 
sciences, and the development of these must be a necessary 
constituent in any life which he presents to himself as one 
in which he can find satisfaction. But " when he sits down 
in a calm hour," it will not be in isolation that the develop- 
ment of any of these faculties will assume the character for 
him of ultimate good. Intrinsic desirableness, sufficiency 



Theology, Anthropology, and Pantheism. 1 75 

to satisfy the rational soul, will be seen to belong to their 
realization only in so far as it is a constituent in a whole of 
social life, of which the distinction, as a social life, shall be 
universality of disinterested goodness.* 

The individual personality is thus realized rather 
than destroyed by large social limitations. And yet 
the person is only relatively realized or complete, 
even in his most perfect organic relations with them. 
His ideal still flies before. His spirit forces him to 
transcend even these lofty forms of the finite, and 
rise to the Infinite and Absolute. He has a potential 
infinitude as his ideal capacity, and the highest pos- 
sible merely human social life gives him only a rela- 
tive infinitude. He is not complete in any or all of 
them. It is Carlyle's shoe-black again with his infi- 
nite craving, " wanting God's infinite universe alto- 
gether to himself." It is Alexander sighing for more 
worlds to conquer. It is the illimitable limit that 
the human spirit posits for its god Terminus. And to 
be conscious of a limit is to be already beyond it, 
and to claim this beyond as its native inheritance. 
But his self-realization in these spheres which threaten 
to limit and ingulf the individual may help us to 
understand how the finite is not absorbed and de- 
stroyed by relation to the Infinite and Absolute First 
Principle that Hegel proposes. More than this, it 
may be said that the spirit's transcendence of them 
is through and by means of them. Or, to put it from 
the other side, they are the media of the divine im- 
manence in the finite spirit. Through them God 
descends to man, and through them man ascends to 
God. He can realize himself in them only so far as 
he sees that they are such media. And he can only 

* Prologomena to Ethics, p. 414. 



1 76 Philosophy of Religion, 

transcend them and rise to the Infinite by using them 
as media. " If a man say, I love God, and hateth 
his brother, he is a liar : for he who loveth not his 
brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God 
whom he hath not seen ? " 

Man then realizes his personality in and through 
the social spheres. But the highest conception of 
humanity, abstracted from God, and the most com- 
plete identification with its life that one can make, 
still has a limit, and forces the flight of the spirit into 
the beyond. Man can only be relatively complete as 
an organic member of the most perfect form of so- 
cial organism. It is in art, religion, and philosophy, 
not as separate from but immanent in and through 
all these spheres, that the finite spirit recognizes and 
attains its full consummation in its unity with the 
Absolute First and Final Principle of the universe. 
Man is never absolutely an independent individual — 
never a little god by himself. Man is man only as 
he is reconciled and united with God. This, it is to 
be noted, is not the individual, but the social man — 
" till we all come, unto a full-grown man, unto the 
measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ." 
Not in separation from God, not in opposition or 
rebellion against God, but in living organic union 
with him, can social man become perfect. The indi- 
vidual is organic to a larger life in the family, and 
that to a larger life in civil society, and that to a 
larger life in the nation, and that to a larger life of 
humanity in universal history, each sphere taking 
up into itself while transcending the lower one. But 
that which takes up and transcends all these spheres, 
and which is their eternal presupposition and life, 
is the life of God in the mind and heart of social 



Theology, Anthropology \ and Pantheism. 177 

man. The whole progress into this completeness 
is "a progress in the consciousness of freedom." 
This is a progress in man's consciousness of God, 
learning that God's " service is perfect freedom," 
because learning that the will of God is the perfect 
law and real content of perfect human will. The 
perfect man, the true head of the race, could say no 
more nor less than " Lo, I am come to do thy will, 
O God." 

The apostles speak of Christians being " partakers 
of the Divine nature " and " partakers of his holiness," 
and " the temple of the living God," as " dwelling in 
God and God in them." They never speak of the 
true life of men other than our Saviour did, that is, 
as being in intimate organic union with the Father 
and the Son through the Holy Spirit. Christ's 
prayer to the Father was that they might all be 
" one in us," " even as we are one." 

That is, the Christian conception of the realiza- 
tion of the personality of men is based upon organic 
union with the Personality of God. Deistic concep- 
tions may lower this genuine Christian view, but 
true philosophy absolutely vindicates and maintains 
it. The presupposition of intelligent, moral man 
attaining unto completeness of personality, is the 
perfect Personality of the Absolute Reason, or God. 
Hegel's First Principle is thus adequate to originate 
and explain and fulfill the personality of finite spirits. 
All the language of Scripture and devotion, and of 
mystical and of Catholic theology unfalteringly as- 
cribes man's redemption, regeneration, and sanctifi- 
cation to the work of Divine Grace. God is all, and 
man nothing without God. We pray God for the 
" spirit to think and do such things as are right," be- 



178 Philosophy of Religion, 

cause " we can not do anything that is good without 
thee," and "that by thy holy inspiration we think 
those things that are good, and by thy merciful guid- 
ing may perform the same." In all this there is no 
thought of the loss of our own personality through 
the overshadowing almightiness of God, or through 
his breaking through our impervious selves and ab- 
sorbing all into himself. Yet we recognize "the 
eternal purpose " revealed in Christ to be that " God 
may be all in all." In this consummation we are 
confident of our own completion in him, "perfect as 
our Father in heaven is perfect," because we are in- 
dissolubly one with him. 

Thus all the teaching of Scripture, of theology, 
and the language of devotion is open to the same 
jealousy of individualism that has been manifested 
toward Hegel's First Principle. In fact, his First 
Principle, and the correlate doctrine of the organic 
unity of the Infinite and the finite, are but the intel- 
ligent expression in terms of thought for thought of the 
very heart and life of Christianity. And it is so pro- 
fessedly. This is fully established in Part III, where 
he explicates the Christian religion as the absolute 
and ultimate religion for man. Dr. E. Mulford, a 
profound theologian as well as a profound student of 
Hegel, says, " I believe that Hegel himself may be 
taken at his word, and instead of being a pantheist 
or panlogist, or whatever may be the last word in- 
vented to define his position, he has sought the rec- 
onciliation of philosophy with Christian truth and 
life." * The coming of God into man, his breaking 
into the individual's impervious self, means larger 

* Article on F. D. Maurice, Scribner's Magazine, September, 1872. 



Theology, Anthropology, and Pantheism, 179 

freedom, fuller life, and more perfect personality for 
man. It gives him that life of the spirit which raises 
man above the categories of death and absorption. 

No one, I affirm, attributes a larger, fuller, or more 
eternal content to the finite spirit than Hegel does. 
His First Principle is adequate to this perfection of 
the individual, because it is identical with the God 
St. Paul preached to the Athenians, as " not far from 
every one of us ; for in him we live and move and 
have our being " ; implying, also, that God lives and 
moves and has his being in us. God is all in all, and 
yet finite spirit is perfected in him. That which 
God creates, redeems, and sanctifies, he reconciles 
and receives unto himself. The wisdom and love 
and goodness he realizes in man are. not a foreign 
"other" to his own nature. This is what Hegel 
means by these sentences in the passage previously 
quoted : " Religion is not merely the spirit putting 
itself in relation with the Absolute Spirit, but it is 
the Absolute Spirit himself relating himself to him- 
self " ; " it is the knowledge which the Divine Spirit 
has of himself through the mediation of the finite 
spirit"; it is "God's own self-consciousness," "his 
own self-recognition." God owns his own. In that 
knowledge of him which is our eternal life, in that 
love of him which he creates in our hearts, we may 
surely say that he knows and loves himself. Deism 
may put up impervious barriers between God and 
man ; but God, in his self-revelation to man, and man 
in his devout . communion with his Father, breaks 
them down as figments of the mere understanding. 
" It is God himself that worketh in us, both to will 
and to do of his good pleasure," and when it is done 
it is his own. We work out our own righteousness 
*7 



1 80 Philosophy of Religion. 

by letting God work his righteousness into us. And 
yet in all this we are living, growing, and developing 
true personality. Dr. Mulford says, with Hegel, 
that " there is in personality the highest that is within 
the knowledge of man. It is the steepest and loftiest 
summit (die hoechste zugeschaerfste spitze, says Hegel) 
toward which we move in our attainment." * Dr. 
Mulford goes on to speak of personality in God and 
man in Hegel's own spirit. The personality of God 
is the same in substance as it is in man, only it is in- 
finite, and is revealed that man may rise into infinite 
and everlasting life. The personality of man has its 
ground in that of God, and through it God reveals 
himself to man and communes with him. No hylo- 
zoic, protoplastic, unanthropomorphic unknown some- 
thing as the ground of all things and of all men, 
can offer any ground of communion between itself 
and man. Lotze goes so far as to say that " perfect 
personality is to be found only in God, while in all 
finite spirits there exists only a weak imitation of per- 
sonality." Hegel would criticise this as not allowing 
enough -reality to human personality, which indeed 
advances into fuller and stronger life in and through 
the God-given social relations and institutions of the 
world. But its relations to these institutions and to 
God himself in and through them are not merely 
external. The relation of one person to another is 
not between but in them. The relation of parent to 
child is more than that of one member of a physical 
organism to another member. " The self-communi- 
cation of the Infinite Spirit to the soul of man is such 
that man is conscious of his relation to a Conscious 

* The Republic of God, p. 22. 



Theology, Anthropology \ and Pantheism. 181 

Being, who is in eternal perfection all that man has 
it in him to be. . . . He is a Being in whom we exist ; 
with whom we are in principle one ; with whom the 
human spirit is identical, in the sense that he IS all 
which the human spirit is capable of becoming." 
These are the words of Prof. T. H. Green,* whom 
Seth criticises for holding Hegel's view of Person- 
ality. I have elsewhere f shown Green's position, 
and gladly repeat it here. 

Prof. Sidgwick, in a polemically critical review 
of Green's Ethics in Mind, No. XXXIV, character- 
izes it as the " one about which our ethical discussion 
is likely for some time to turn," and its author as one 
who " never wrote for victory." This is the highest 
praise generously accorded by one whom Green 
criticises very keenly in his volume. I lay it down 
after a studious reading, with a profound regard for 
the moral fervor and for the deeply religious spirit 
that pervades it throughout, as well as for the philo- 
sophical breadth and acumen and the close and pow- 
erful reasoning it maintains from first to last ; thank- 
ful for the ethical tonic it has given as well as for the 
interpretation and comprehension of ethical experi- 
ence which it contains. Its enthusiasm for human 
perfection, or well-being, in its most catholic sense, 
too, is nourished by the most unwavering faith that 
man is not the orphaned child of an absent Unknow- 
able. Theism is the vital breath that animates the 
whole. I take it as the highest type of theistic as 
well as philosophical ethics to-day. I can not at- 
tempt even an exposition, much less a criticism of 

* Prolegomena to Ethics, pp. 197, 349. 

f Theistic Ethics, The Church Review, October, 1887. 



1 82 Philosophy of Religion. . 

the whole volume, which is too compact to admit of 
abridging without marring. I can only indicate his 
leading principles and results. It is another of those 
books which would " be much shorter if it were not 
so short," which could be more easily and lucidly 
expanded than condensed. 

The lamented author died five years ago. He is 
generally referred to by the Scottish philosophers as 
the " recognized leader of Hegelianism at Oxford." 
Hegel never wrote on the subjective side of the 
ethical question. He presents his ethical doctrine 
in his Philosophic des Rechts on its objective side, 
as realized, in the customary morality of family, com- 
munity, and especially in that of the state, the high- 
est manifestation of universal reason in the sphere of 
practice. Kant, on the other hand, emphasized the 
formal, subjective good-will as the essence of moral- 
ity. Green's volume also deals with the subjective 
side, and is an exposition of the development of this 
side through Fichte to Hegel. 

He maintains that a metaphysic of morals is both 
possible and necessary, as the proper foundation of 
every system of ethics. The reality of the ideas of 
freedom and duty can only be maintained by a meta- 
physic that makes man to be something more than a 
derivative product of mere nature. If we can not 
demonstrate a ///^ta-nature for man, we can have no 
moral science other than the natural history of how 
men do act, not how men ought to act. For " it is 
obvious that to a being who is simply the result of 
natural forces, an injunction to conform to their laws 
is unmeaning." Hence, " at the risk of repelling 
readers by presenting them first with the most diffi- 
cult and least plausible part of his doctrine," he be- 



Theology, Anthropology, and Pantheism. 183 

gins with the exposition of the metaphysic of morals. 
The metaphysic of anything, we may say, is the con- 
ditions implied in its being, it is the total environment 
which its existence presupposes, the totality of those 
relations which its own analysis and interpretation 
imply and demand, the larger, truer self that does 
not appear at first glance to the naked physical eye. 
Such a metaphysic or meta-miur?! basis there must 
be for Ethics. As merely one of the natural sciences, 
it would cease to be possible. No historical research 
into sub-human and pre-moral conduct, coupled with 
laws of physical evolution, can afford an explanation 
of mental and moral phenomena. Back of, beneath, 
immanent in (jiera) all things physical, there is that 
by virtue of which they are their larger self. What 
is the metaphysics of man, mental and moral ? An- 
swered plainly in a word, it is God. Man alone 
does not create his own universe, does not exist 
alone — there is not far from every one Him in whom 
alone one can live and move and have any real 
being. Proof of this, in the common sense of the 
word, is out of place. But it is the only concep- 
tion that enables us, reflecting on our moral and in- 
tellectual experience conjointly, to put the whole 
cosmos of experience together, and understand how 
(not why) we are and do what we consciously are 
and do. 

This theistic conception is the only key that fits 
into all the wards of the complicated lock of life. 
Such, and the correlated doctrine of God making 
man in his own image, is the result of the first two 
books of this volume, translated out of the technical 
form of the text. But I will let the author speak for 
himself. The First Book answers the question, "Can 



184 Philosophy of Religion. 

the knowledge of nature be itself a part or product 
of nature?" or, otherwise stated, " What conditions 
on the part of consciousness are implied in the fact 
that there is such a thing as knowledge ? " The re- 
ply to this gives the metaphysics of knowledge, and 
consists in an analysis of knowledge itself. He goes 
straight through the hysteron-proteron of empiricism, 
and the absolutely irrational subjective Idealism and 
its correlated Agnosticism of Kant, to the Absolute 
Idealism of Theism. 

There is no unknowable Ding an Sickj nor any 
mere matter in the universe. The synthesis in man's 
consciousness, which we call knowledge, implies and 
demands an absolute consciousness. 

Our consciousness has a history bounded by time 
apparently. " But this apparent state of the case can 
only be explained by supposing that in the growth 
of our experience, in the process of our learning to 
know the world, an animal organism which has its 
history in time gradually becomes the vehicle of an 
eternally complete consciousness" (p. 72). Again: 
" The attainment of knowledge is only explicable as 
a reproduction of itself, in the human soul, by the 
consciousness for which the cosmos of related facts 
exists — a reproduction of itself, in which it uses the 
sentient life of the soul as its organ." Man's brain 
differs from that of animals, because it is organic to 
knowledge, and so is not affected by any processes 
of evolution, or empirical history by which his phys- 
ical existence has been developed. " If there are 
reasons for holding that man, in respect of his animal 
nature, is descended from i mere ' animals — animals 
to whom the functions of life and sense were not 
organic to the eternal or distinctively human con- 



Theology, Anthropology, and Pantheism. 185 

sciousness — this does not affect our conclusion in 
regard to the consciousness, of which, as he now is, 
man is the subject ; a conclusion founded on analysis 
of what he now is and does " (pp. 77, 87) — that is, we 
may add — 

A man's a man for a' that. 

" God is the Eternal Spirit or self-consciousness 
subject, which communicates itself, in measure and 
under conditions, to beings who through that com- 
munication become spiritual. He is a Being in 
whom we exist ; with whom we are in principle 
one ; with whom the human spirit is identical in the 
sense that he is all which the human spirit is capable 
of becoming." This is distinctly the Christian doc- 
trine of God, the Creator, breathing into man the 
breath of mental and moral as well as of physical 
life. General readers will not care for a reproduc- 
tion of the close, sustained, analytical, and philo- 
sophical arguments by which he reaches this pro- 
nounced theistic conception, and I would advise 
them to omit this First Book, which he himself char- 
acterizes as likely to repel readers. 

In Book Second he takes up the Metaphysics of 
moral action in the same method. " What are the 
conditions on the part of consciousness implied in 
the fact that there is such a thing as morality ? " 

We find our moral activity, like our mental, con- 
ditioned by sensational elements, inextricably inter- 
woven with physical instincts, animal impulses, wants, 
and desires. But an animal want is not the whole of 
man's moral motive. It runs into, or rather is taken 
up by, a self-conscious subject, making it a wanted 
object for self. 

"It only becomes a motive, so far as upon the 






1 86 Philosophy of Religion. 

want there supervenes the presentation of the want 
by a self-conscious subject to himself, and with it the 
idea of a self-satisfaction to be attained in filling the 
want " (p. 93). 

" It is this consciousness which yields, in the most 
elementary form, the conception of something that 
should be, as distinct from that which is " (p. 92). 

He defines a motive to be "an idea of an end, 
which a self-conscious subject presents to itself, and 
which it strives and tends to realize," which he main- 
tains is sufficient to differentiate moral action from 
natural, necessitated, physical activity. One can be 
said to be determined by his desires only so far as he 
consciously makes them his objects, or seeks his self-satis- 
faction in them When, for example, Esau sells his 
birthright, an animal want conditions his motive, but 
the motive itself is his idea of himself as finding his 
good in the satisfaction of the animal want. Other- 
wise he would not be responsible. It is this identifica- 
tion of himself with the animal want, this making it his 
good, that constitutes it his strongest motive, and at 
the same time makes him responsible. He has said 
to himself, that will satisfy me, that is good, thereby 
constituting freely the strongest motive and deter- 
mining himself. The good which one thus chooses 
is always comparative. This formal freedom will 
not become real freedom till the ends or goods in 
which self-satisfaction is sought are such as can really 
satisfy the perfect man. The real nature of any act 
of will thus depends upon the nature of the object 
which one chooses as his good, and this choice de- 
pends upon the character of the chooser. All moral 
action thus is the realizing of the good, better, best 
self within us. We thus mold circumstances, wants, 



Theology, Anthropology, and Pantheism, 187 

and impulses. Esau chose a good, but not a better 
nor the best. All this seems implied in Green's ex- 
position, though not explicitly stated. And this im- 
plies the privative or comparative view of sin — the 
choice of an inferior good. 

This, too, must be taken in connection with his 
metaphysic of morality, which is that of an eternal 
self-conscious subject, which makes the processes of 
animal life and impulse organic to a reproduction of 
itself, which reproduction is qualified and limited by 
the nature of those processes, but which constitutes 
free, self-conscious subjects — sons of God made in 
his own image. 

Indeed, " alike as in God, as communicated in 
principle to men, and as realizing itself by means 
of that communication in a certain development of 
human capacities, the idea can have its being only 
in a personal — i. e., a self-objectifying — consciousness" 
(p. 203). 

The more man realizes his personality the nearer 
he approaches God, and the better God can recog- 
nize and love himself in those thus made perfect in 
his image. This realization we have seen is through 
the secular institutions of the Spirit. Through them 
man pierces beyond them to the perfect Personality. 
Such relation to the Divine Personality gives life 
and freedom. God's law is recognized by man as 
his own law. Nature, a Universum, and Unknown, can 
never relate itself to man so as to give this free- 
dom. Ultimately fear and despair result from all 
such conceptions of " the power not ourselves." The 
individual may exalt himself to promethean or satanic 
might and majesty ; he may reach the acme of human 
culture and of power over nature, and yet the outly- 



1 88 Philosophy of Religion. 

ing, overshadowing of something simply infinite will 
finally crush his spirit and wring out the pessimistic 
exclamation, " Vanity of vanities, all is vanity." 
With Prometheus he may 

Suffer woes which hope thinks infinite, and 
Defy power which seems omnipotent ; 

but he will still be bound till his spirit faints and 
quails, and he becomes the despairing pessimist or 
the servilely superstitious man. Such is the outcome 
of every " age of Augustus " of the Eclair cissement, 
die Aufklaerung and the eighteenth-century rational- 
ism, so far as merely human, and divorced from con- 
scious relations with God. Such, too, will be the 
outcome of modern culture and science so far as 
divorced from, or failing to recognize, the Divine 
Personality as the Spirit 

. . . that impels 
All thinking things, all objects of all thought, 
And rolls through all things. 

Unless " the power not himself " is personal, he can 
not have that confident congenial relation with it, 
that is essential to free, ethical self-determination and 
to " the blessed hope of everlasting life." 

With Hegel, Personality is the ground of all 
things, the head and heart of the universe, in which 
alone human intelligence and love and culture are 
possible and valid. Through these he rises above 
the finite, and holds communion with the Infinite 
Power not himself. In and through them as 
media he comes face to face with God, and enters 
the life immortal and personal. Beyond and about 
him is the life of God which he recognizes as his 






Theology \ Anthropology, and Pantheism, 189 

life, even as God recognizes his life as His own. 
Thus it is impossible to speak of the personality of 
God or man without speaking of both. 

Philosophy thus comprehends for thought what 
religion holds in its heart. It thinks its creed in 
terms of thought, and thus itself becomes religious. 
Thinking is worshiping. Completed thought com- 
pels reverence before the august Personality which 
it reaches as its ultimate attainment and recognizes 
as its primal and sustaining source. In this Part 
First, thought is thinking only or chiefly the first 
article of the Creed : " I believe in God the Father 
Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth." In Part 
Third, Hegel shows us thought thinking all the other 
articles of the oecumenical creeds, following in the 
lines of the Church's great " saints of the intellect as 
well as of the heart." Full justification of his Philos- 
ophy of Religion, therefore, can not be evinced until 
proper exposition of that part be made in a Second 
Series of Studies. 

Some Christians will not need, and some will not 
care to have, their creed thus thought into an organic, 
systematic, and absolutely necessary whole. But 
those who are asking for the reason of the faith can 
not rest in the reasons which current apologetics 
give, or on the ultima ratio ecclesice, until these rea- 
sons and this authority are vindicated by the reason 
of absolute thought and authority. Philosophy 
may show the inadequateness of modern evidences 
and of church authority on its way to a point 
whence it can return and reinstate them as valid 
evidences and authority, giving the reason of these 
reasons and the authority of this authority. But 
we have thus far seen, at least, the point of view, the 



190 Philosophy of Religion. 

spirit and method, by which Hegel vindicates the 
neeessity of religion as the very heart of thought. 
Let me go over once again the central station of this 
conception of the universe as thought — this Weltan- 
schauung. 

I can indicate the point of view of his interpre 
tation of the universe no better than by saying that 
its key-word is organic unity, as opposed to merely 
arbitrary or mechanical relations of the great objects 
of knowledge — God, man, and the world, as set forth 
in empirical philosophy, common logic, and deistic 
theology. In place of the abstract principle of 
identity and contradiction, by means of which one — 

The parts in his hand he may hold and class, 
But the spiritual link is lost, alas ! — 

there is given the principle of organic unity, which, 
without losing the identity of the objects, also pre- 
serves them from the annihilation that would other- 
wise be effected by their differences. Shelley has 
delicately expressed the sentimental side of this truth 
in his Love's Philosophy : 

The fountains mingle with the river 

And the rivers with the ocean, 
The winds of heaven mix forever 

With a sweet emotion ; 
Nothing in the world is single ; 

All things, by a law divine, 
In one another's being mingle — 

Why not I with thine ? 
See, the mountains kiss high heaven, 

And the waves clasp one another; 
No sister flower would be forgiven 

If it disdained its brother ; 



" Theology \ Anthropology \ and Pantheism, 191 

And the sunlight clasps the earth, 
And the moonbeams kiss the sea— 

What are all these kissings worth, 
If thou kiss not me ? 

Philosophy rules out the subjective idealism and 
pantheism of an absolute identity of all objects, as 
well as their empirical separation by absolute differ- 
ences. For philosophy requires that subject and 
object be distinct. The physical universe is not all 
in the eye of the beholder, but is a real object of 
intelligence. Man is not identical with nature, nor 
God with man. But the reality that each possesses 
is that which, in spite of differences and distinctions, 
is of the same kith and kin in all. The resolute 
maintenance of this is a distinguishing mark of what 
we may term both English and American Hegelians. 
The personality of God and man, and the objective 
reality of the world, are strenuously maintained by 
them all. 

Modern philosophy takes its start in the science 
of knowing, and passes from knowing to being. 
How can we know ? Let us go back and begin anew 
from this point. This the great fundamental prob- 
lem of Philosophy, connected, as it is, inseparably 
and organically with the problem of Being, What is 
it for a man or for any thing to be ? What is being ? 
Is reality the object of knowledge? It is naught 
unless we can know, unless we can experience its 
reality. Knowing is thus the key to being. But how 
is knowledge possible ? How can we know ? It 
seems a very simple question to ask, How do I 
know ? What is knowledge, and how do I come by 
it? What is its relation to the subject and object of 
knowledge ? What part of knowledge is supplied 
18 



192 Philosophy of Religion. 

by external objects? What part does man supply? 
What is the relation between the two factors and 
the result called knowledge? Is it an unknown 
tertium quid, compounded of two other unknowns? 
We are familiar with the answer of English Empiri- 
cism, of which Hume's absolute skepticism as to any 
knowledge is the logical result. The current Ag- 
nosticism is but this skepticism apotheosized. The 
subject and object, and their synthesis, are inherently 
unknowable. Isolated as they are in time and space, 
in no living relation, as the theory holds, nothing can 
bring them together in other than a merely mechani- 
cal relation, and, therefore, no synthetic judgments 
a priori, are possible or valid. We are familiar, too, 
in a popular way, with Kant's solution of the prob- 
lem. That gives the reverse and isolated side of 
concrete experience, and thus, only reaching Agnos- 
ticism by a more intellectual route, mind and matter, 
God and nature, man and all objects of possible 
knowledge, according to both the empirical and the 
transcendental solutions, are isolated, and can only 
be brought into a mechanical relation a toute force. 
They are inherently, or as to their natures, unre- 
lated. They form a loose aggregate, not an organic 
whole. Theist, deist, and skeptic alike, on either 
of these solutions, can give no rational science of 
knowledge, and so can apprehend no reality, no real 
being. 

But, in order to any knowing or known being, 
the subject and object must be in organic rela- 
tion — must have something in common, and live 
together. Intelligence must be an energy in con- 
nection with energetic reality. The mind is not 
simply like a piece of blank paper upon which ob- 



Theology \ Anthropology, and Pantheism, 193 

jects impress themselves, which is the favorite figure 
of sensationalists. The mind is active in receiving 
and unifying those impressions. Nor, on the other 
hand, are all objects of knowledge chaotic unintel- 
ligence, which the synthesizing power of the mind 
forces into the strait-jacket of categories, to which 
these objects stand in an attitude of indifference or 
rebellion. The idealist's solution, too, fails. Appeal 
must be taken to experience, to the full content of 
consciousness. But this experience is other and 
greater than either sensationalist or idealist allows. 
Subject and object are both in consciousness in the 
act of knowing. They are not indifferent to each 
other. Their coming together is neither accidental 
nor arbitrary. The rather they are complemental 
and inseparable. Each implies, and is most intimately 
one with the other. The object becomes object only 
as it becomes part of the subject, for all experience 
is that of self-consciousness. Again, the subject be- 
comes subject only as it merges itself in its object, 
for all consciousness is also objective consciousness. 
Thus the fundamental relation of subject and object 
in the process of knowing is one that can only be 
called organic, or the relation of particular to par- 
ticular through the organic identification of both in 
the universal. It is a relation of life, of living sub- 
ject and living object, in and through a Universal, 
which (as God) gives life and light to all reality. 
Neither are they mere space-occupying atoms, nor 
are they merely sensible entities or nonentities, me- 
chanically separated from each other. They actively 
unite in one, and yet keep themselves differentiated 
from each other. Knowing is thus a unifying pro- 
cess. The subject, to use a sensible analogy for a 



194 Philosophy of Religion. 

spiritual process, passes over and loses itself in its 
object, and, finding its larger self in the object, it 
passes back to its subjective starting-point. Only in 
this way can the subject be aware of or know its 
object, or itself as its own object. In losing its life 
in the object, the subject finds its own fuller life ; 
wherever it goes it is styi " at home." The more it 
goes out of itself, the fuller experience and wider 
wisdom it requires. The undifferentiated subject 
would be a blank nonentity. Nothing intelligible 
is alien to the knowing subject. Its object, or its 
" other," is always larger than itself. In every act 
of conscious intelligence, self-consciousness finds it- 
self reflected, or rather realized. It is an intercom- 
munion of mind with reason, spirit with spirit. The 
knowing agent thus finds himself set in the midst 
of an intelligible world of which he is a part. The 
forms of his intelligence are the forms of the world's 
existence. He is both the interpreter and the in- 
terpretation of nature. Hieroglyphics as strange as 
chaos have finally been deciphered, because they 
contained intelligence. Otherwise they would never 
have been more than the scratches of a lion upon 
the rocks. Man can only decipher a riddle that holds 
a meaning, contains thought. Intelligence subjective 
finds its larger self in intelligence objective, both 
being organically articulated as members of absolute 
intelligence. This last is not merely an inference 
from, but it is an implicit content of, concrete ex- 
perience. Reason, both subjective and objective, is 
personal. It is not only that of the individual man, 
but of man as a race. Nor is it only of sense-con- 
ditioned man. It exists independently of all knowing 
men. But, as it can exist only in self-conscious per- 



Theology, Anthropology, and Pantheism. 195 

sonality, it exists in Absolute Spirit. All concrete 
experience is the apprehension of objective con- 
sciousness by subjective consciousness. Both have 
their reality in organic synthesis. Thought within 
finds thought without. The microcosmic deity within 
finds its macrocosmic Deity without. Man geome- 
trizes and finds the diagrams writ large by another 
hand in nature. He finds God speaking to him, and 
God finds him intelligent to his intelligent self-reve- 
lations. 

But man's intelligence is not creative but rather 
recreative ; not an absolutely independent center but 
the planet of a central Sun. Absolute intelligence 
existed before he began to have self-conscious intelli- 
gence, in which alone can his own live and move 
and have its being. 

The finite self-consciousness involves and reveals its 
dependence on an absolute self-consciousness which, pro- 
visionally, we can only call, in agreement with philosophy 
and religion, the self-consciousness of an Absolute . and 
Divine Spirit.* 

This passage from a knowing agent to intelligent 
Absolute Being is inevitable. Knowing implies real 
being. The self-conscious intelligence of man im- 
plies the absolute intelligence — God. Thus the 
problem of knowing lands us in, and is identical with, 
the problem of being, and only ideally distinguish- 
able from it. The spirituality of Absolute Being — 
which is the presupposition of Religion — is the 
attainment of Philosophy. Philosophy only comes 
to analyze, and redemonstrate, or point out this re- 
ality, livingly possessed by Religion. Thought is 

* Prof. George S. Morris, Philosophy and Christianity, p. 56. 



196 Philosophy of Religion, 

prior to being with us. Being is prior to thought in 
us. But, absolutely considered, there is unity of 
thought and being. But it is not our own individual 
thought and being that are absolute and identical. 
But the absolute object of our intelligence, the unity 
of being which our every act of knowing implies, is 
that of Absolute Spirit. The real presupposition of 
all knowledge is not my own consciousness of myself 
as an individual, but thought or self-consciousness 
which is beyond all individual selves, which is the 
unity of all thinkers and all objects of thought. That 
universal Self-consciousness, which the conscious life 
of all finite minds implies and on which it is based, is 
Absolute Spirit — God. We know only in part, but 
are known in toto by the Absolute Intelligence. What 
man is by his self-conscious personality imperfectly, 
that God is infinitely, perfectly, independently. Man's 
intelligence can thus extend in ever-widening circles 
over the universe without ever missing its larger 
image. Wherever it goes it is still at home. With 
increasing intelligence, he loses his sense of isolation, 
and ceases to feel a stranger anywhere in the world. 
Nothing true is foreign to him, but all reality is, as 
it were, bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. In 
all its discoveries, in Science, Art, and Religion, it 
discovers itself. So of all revelation — it is a revela- 
tion of intelligence to kindred intelligence for its 
enlargement. Thus too God, as Absolute Spirit, is 
everywhere at home in the universe, and the Deistic 
conception, which has had so pernicious currency in 
Christian thought, is no longer tenable. Our Father 
in heaven is also our Father on earth, his footstool. 
Within the inmost closet of our heart he is as much 
on his throne as on fiery Sinai. 



Theology, Anthropology, and Pantheism, 197 

The Scriptures represent the Christian life as 
most intimately and indissolubly bound up with 
knowledge. To know God is eternal life. This is 
real spiritual knowledge, and differs from the merely 
individual and relative. St. Paul says, " I know 
nothing by myself," and declares that " we are not 
sufficient of ourselves to think anything as of our- 
selves." In Christianity, as in Philosophy, the Uni- 
versal is the category of living reality. The indi- 
vidual subject must " lose his life " in that of the 
Universal, in order " to find it." Christian knowl- 
edge is realized only through a participation in God's 
truth through organic union with the Logos. It is 
to be begun, continued, and ended, not in mechanical 
or a pantheistic process of evolution, but in God. 
God is the Author of all our true thinking, doing, be- 
ing. It is only by his holy inspiration that we think 
those things that are good. Thus all true knowledge 
is of the nature of revelation. Thus, too, no revela- 
tion can be merely mechanical — the presentation of a 
foreign topic, previously undreamed of and unlonged 
for. For all revelation is in form and kind of self- 
revelation — the revelation of intelligence to intelli- 
gence. In all true knowledge, either philosophic or 
religious, one knows only one's own larger self, and 
in all one's findings finds that same larger self. Only 
as we know God, and are partakers of the Divine 
Intelligence, is this larger self graciously bestowed 
upon us as the precondition of true and eternal ex- 
istence. The voice of God is the voice of man — that 
is, of man according to his true nature and intent. 
The perfect man was the God-man, Jesus Christ. He 
is the perfect revelation of living truth. This reve- 
lation may not be completely apprehended by us, in 



198 Philosophy of Religion. 






all its details, but, in its substance, it must be intelli- 
gible to us. Jesus must be our elder brother, as well 
as our unquestioned master. Unrealized, the Eternal 
Son had yet ever been " the light of the world." 
Misunderstood, or even verbally denied, the Christ 
is yet to-day the light of all true knowledge. It is 
the revelation of intelligence to intelligence. " In- 
telligence must find its own larger lineaments pre- 
figured in every dogma." For true and proper man, 
no truth is or can be essentially mysterious, nor could 
any revelation of such be either made or received by 
intelligence. I gladly bear witness to the pregnant 
significance of Dr. Mulford's views of Revelation in 
his Republic of God, commending them for a studi- 
ous perusal to all possessing a thoughtful interest in 
the subject. Hegel's theory of true knowing and 
real being should prevent any hasty conclusion from 
his words to a vulgar rationalism, which he opposes 
as strenuously as any of us could wish. His whole 
philosophy is a protest against the individualism of 
so-called free thought. It is only as our individuality 
increases and develops into personality, by entering 
into the larger life in religion, society, and art, only 
as we become organically one with these larger forms 
of intelligence, only as *Deus nos personal, that we are 
able to think anything truly. But the same philoso- 
phy is no less a strenuous rebuttal of all sorts of 
Agnosticism, scientific, philosophical, and religious. 
It is because our experience is a fragment of a living 
organic whole, that we may read in it the law and 
nature of the whole. Now, " I know," though only 
in part. When my union with the Divine Spirit 
becomes perfect, " then shall I know, even also as I 
am known." 



Theology, Anthropology, and Pantheism, 199 

Against such (Christian) reason, the epithets of 
rationalism and naturalism are only ignorantly and 
vainly hurled. Such views are as vitally supernatu- 
ral and hyperrational as any thoughtful Christian can 
maintain. They consist most kinly with a super- 
natural naturalism. The Divine element is asserted 
as the presupposition of all true experience. God 
is transcendent no less than immanent. The Deistic 
conception which has been so largely regnant in 
English apologetics set the natural and the super- 
natural over against each other as almost contra- 
dictory opposites. The canon of formal logic that 
" A is not non-A," being applied, there resulted 
either a low naturalism or a merely mechanical 
supernaturalism of sheer brute power to interfere 
and direct as from without and above. But true ex- 
perience denies that man and the world are naturally 
isolated from God, strangers and foreigners to him 
in their essential being and activity. Against such 
conceptions Hegel's most trenchant criticisms are 
directed. His Philosophy of Religion is not all spun 
out of a priori elements. He claims to do nothing 
but to think the creed, to comprehend religious ex- 
perience. 

Religion, he says, is spirit thinking naively, while 
philosophy is the same spirit passing beyond this im- 
mediate apprehension of vital truth and through the 
bewildering skepticism raised by the reflective or 
critical understanding when it attempts to analyze 
and think together again this content of feeling and 
representation, to the speculative comprehension of the 
same content. It presents the content intelligized for 
the intellect. Thinking this content, it attains to the 
ultimate and everywhere vitalizing idea of religion, 



200 Philosophy of Religion. 

and then proceeds to re-read religious experience in 
the light and under the necessary forms of this idea. 
In Part III Hegel identifies his philosophy with 
Christianity, and seeks to " rehabilitate genuine Cath- 
olic dogma" after the iconoclasm of the Aufklaerung. 
He died, says one, with the firm conviction that he 
had established eternal peace between theology and 
the wisdom of the world ; and this, too, he sought not 
in the way of eviscerating Christianity of its divine 
claims and content, nor in the way of weak rational- 
izing away from dogma all that was offensive to the 
cultured rationalism (A ufklaerung) of the eighteenth 
century. He believed firmly in the necessity of posi- 
tive dogmatic theology. He is said to have seriously 
blamed Tholuck for his lack of zeal in defending the 
doctrine of the Trinity. Certainly no one could ask 
for more explicit maintenance of the Church as the 
Keeper of the Keys and the guardian of the truth in 
the shape of Catholic dogma than that which he 
gives in Part III. The Church is " the realm of the 
Holy Spirit," and thinks the gospel into the form of 
valid and authoritative creed and dogma. 

And now our third reply to the query (p. 154) 
What have we here ? 

III. We have not Pantheism. 

It seems scarcely necessary to add to what we 
have already said as to Hegel's maintenance of both 
the Divine and human personality. The pantheism 
which is the " peculiar and just horror of the relig- 
ious mind " is that ontology which ascribes no proper 
personality to either God or man. Hegel's philos- 
ophy is not pantheism. If further argument were 
needed, it might be put in the ad hominem form. If 
Hegel was a pantheist, then also was St. John : " In 






Theology, Anthropology, and Pantheism. 201 

the beginning was the Word, . . . without him was 
not anything made that was made." His life is " the 
light of men . . . that lighteth every man that cometh 
into the world." Then also was St. Paul a pantheist : 
" In him we live and move and have our being." 
Then also was the Psalmist, vainly trying to flee away 
from God, a pantheist. Then also was Isaiah a pan- 
theist : " We are the clay and thou our potter." 
Then also was Jeremiah a pantheist : " I am a God at 
hand, saith the Lord, and not a God afar off. Do 
not I fill heaven and earth? saith the Lord." Then 
also was Christ himself a pantheist : " That they all 
may be one . . . even as we are one . . . I in them 
and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in 
one." 

Nearly every great saint of the intellect and heart 
in the Church can thus be accused of pantheism. St. 
Augustine writes thus : 

To call upon Him I must call Him into myself. ... Is 
there, then, O Lord my God, any room so spacious in me 
that can contain Thee ? Or can the heaven and the earth 
which Thou hast made . . . contain Thee ? Or is it so, that 
since nothing that is could be without Thee, therefore what- 
ever is must contain Thee ? Since, therefore, I also am, why 
do I ask that Thou come into me, who could have no being, 
if Thou wert not in me ? For I am not now so low as hell, 
and yet Thou art even there also. Therefore I should not 
be, O my God, I should not be at all if Thou wert not in me, 
or rather I should not be if I wert not in Thee, of whom all 
things, by whom all things, and in whom are all things. It is 
even so, O Lord, it is even so.* 

The Platonic Bishop Synesius sang thus : 
* St. Augustine's Confessions, vol. i, p. 2. 



202 Philosophy of Religion. 

Thou art the begetting 

And the begotten. 

Thou art the illumining 

And the illumined. 

Thou art the manifest — 

And the hidden — hid by thy glories. 

One and yet all things thou. 

One in thyself alone, 

And throughout all things one. 

The mediaeval mystic Eckhart, founder of the 
large school of religious thinkers of whom Tauler and 
the author of the Theologica Germanica were chief 
representatives, writes thus : " God and / are one in 
knowing. The eye whereby I see God is the same 
eye whereby he seeth me. Mine eye and the eye of 
God are one eye, one vision, one knowledge, and one 
love. . . . God has become man that I might become 
God." And yet he maintains that in this union with 
God our personality is restored to its true person- 
ality by becoming active in and with the personal 
God! 

St. Gregory the Great ascribes all to God. He 
says: 

God dwelleth within all things. He is outside all things, 
above all things, beneath all things, above by power, be- 
neath by sustentation, outside by magnitude, within by sub- 
tility ; ruling above, containing below, encompassing with- 
out, penetrating within. Nor is He higher in one part, lower 
in another, nor abiding outer in one part and inner in an- 
other, but one and the same in his entirety, everywhere sus- 
taining by ruling, ruling by sustaining, penetrating by en- 
compassing, encompassing by penetrating; and whenceso- 
ever He is ruling above, thence He sustains below ; and 
whence He outwardly encompasses, thence He inwardly 



Theology, Anthropology, and Pantheism, 203 

fills ; ruling above without unrest, sustaining below without 
toil, piercing noiselessly within, encompassing outwardly 
without extension. 

The language of lofty theology and of deep devo- 
tion is almost invariably that of what may be stigma- 
tized as pantheism, if that term be used without criti- 
cism and proper definition. Whose books of devotion 
are the companions of devout souls, books that we 
flee to in hours of spiritual conflict and ecstatic rapt- 
ure ? They are, after the Psalms and Isaiah and St. 
John, the volumes of Tauler and De Sales, Thomas a 
Kempis, Fenelon, and William Law — men who had no 
jealousy of their God, but who would gladly empty 
themselves that He might fill them. This argument 
ad hominem will come home to every one who has 
ever felt the thrill of genuine devotion, who has ever 
been on the Mount of Transfiguration, who has ever 
felt the Everlasting Arms beneath him and the Infi- 
nite Love within him. Yes, we are all pantheists in 
moments of our most exalted devotion and thought. 

But what is pantheism ? What multitude of sins 
this ambiguous term has been used to cover ! " One 
of the first uses of this word is by Toland in the Pan- 
theisticon (a. d. 1720), where, however, it has its 
ancient polytheistic sense. It is a little later that it 
passes from the idea of the worship of the whole of 
the gods to the worship of the entire universe looked 
at as God." * Since then it has been one of the con- 
secrated terms of theological polemics. Bayle's vig- 
orous criticism of pantheism amounted to about this, 
that pantheism so diffuses God that he is as much in 
an ass as in an angel ; and that vulgar method is often 

* A. S. Farrar, Critical History of Free Thought, p. 414. 
19 



204 Philosophy of Religion, 

vulgarly used to-day, based upon a supposed ety- 
mology of the word Pan, all, and Theos, God. The 
all is God. He is the quantitative sum total of all 
things. This is atheistic pantheism ; but the emphasis 
may be put upon the other part of the word, and for 
/^theism we have Pantheism — that is, God is all, the 
only reality, all things being evanescent nonentities. 
This is acosmic pantheism, as Hegel styles Spinoza's 
system. This form is, at least, anti-materialistic. Its 
first principle may be so impersonal as to exclude 
all religion, or it may rise to theistic or even Chris- 
tian content and become what we may call personal 
pantheism, as with Eckhart, Schleiermacher, Male- 
branche, and Berkeley. 

But even where the First Principle is made per- 
sonal, God may be conceived as " all in all " in a 
way hostile to human personality and immortality. 
The emphasis may be placed upon the physical attri- 
butes of omnipotence rather than upon the ethical 
ones of love and righteousness, so that the souls that 
He has made fail and shrivel up before him (Isaiah 
lvii, 1 6). The Calvinism of Jonathan Edwards cer- 
tainly is open to the charge of such unethical per- 
sonal pantheism. It is only a relatively higher form 
than impersonal pantheism, which yields only emana- 
tion cycling back to primal source. Pantheism be- 
comes ethical theism only when it develops its first 
principle from impersonal Substance or Force or 
Will into the personal form of Self-conscious, loving 
intelligence ; but then it is no longer obnoxious pan- 
theism. It might better be termed hyper-deism. It is 
that of Jeremiah: "I am a God at hand, saith the 
Lord, and not a God afar off. Do not I fill heaven 
and earth? " Immanence is added to transcendence. 



Theology », Anthropology \ and Pantheism, 205 

On the one hand, God is conceived as eternally per- 
fect, self-communicating, and self-participating love 
and communion in his Triune nature. On the other 
hand, creation is conceived as the free act of Divine 
love morally necessitated and the incarnation as the 
goal and summit of this creation. 

Far more vital significance is thus given to the 
doctrine of the Fatherhood of God and the sonship of 
man, created, redeemed, and sanctified in his image — 
made perfect as he is perfect. God is in no wise lim- 
ited by the increasing number of his dear children. 
Neither are they made less in thus growing into his 
perfection. As they become perfect, God recognizes 
himself in them, and their complete self-determination 
completes his self-consciousness. It is Hegel's asser- 
tion that the self-consciousness of man is the comple- 
tion of the Divine Self-consciousness that gives any 
seeming likeness of his ontology to pantheism. This 
has been interpreted to mean that God first comes to 
consciousness in man, that He passes from an uncon- 
scious state to consciousness first when finite creatures 
become conscious. This is obnoxious pantheism. It 
is the doctrine of Schopenhauer and of some of the 
left-wing Hegelians, who did not pretend to say that 
it was Hegel's teaching, but what he ought to have 
taught. None but either ignorant or willful perver- 
sion of Hegel's thought and express words can at- 
tribute to him this atheism of making God to be self- 
conscious only in finite consciousness. Neither is the 
kindred charge that he makes mere finite spirit Divine 
or one with Deity true. This horrible distortion of 
Hegel's thought was made by Strauss and Feuerbach. 
To maintain as they did that the empirical ego — the 
natural man — is divine or spiritual, is as far from 



206 Philosophy of Religion. 

Hegel's as from St. Paul thought.* No man is divine 
or spiritual, but man as man is made capable of the 
Divine. But this capacity can only be realized by 
the refining away the rubbish of the natural man 
through an age-long labor under divine education. 
" Die to live " is the command to the old man and the 
promise to the new man. In so far as this is realized 
in man, God is conscious of himself in spirits infini- 
tized into his own image, and man attains conscious- 
ness of his own true self in God. This is implicitly 
realized in true religion, in which man has this reality 
through justification by faith, so that God can love 
and own him as his own flesh and blood. God and 
man are not side-by-side beings, nor are they confus- 
edly mixed and identified. Hegel's conception avoids 
the deistic separation and the pantheistic confusing 
together of God and man. Prof. Pfleiderer says that 
this " is not only the most correct interpretation of 
the Hegelian philosophy, but is right in itself. This, 
I think, is beyond doubt " (Religions - Philosophic, 
vol. i, p. 590). 

Obnoxious pantheism is an exotic in Occidental 
thought. It is at home in the Orient. Oriental pan- 
theism is justly the horror of our religious mind. In- 
stead of making God the spiritual, ethical unity of 
all things, it makes him either the quantitative sum 
total of them or denies any reality to them. In 
either way it makes far too little of the place and 
worth and destiny of men. Consciousness is con- 
ceived as a temporary, finite, unsubstantial phase of 

* "When man is said to be divine, or the mere finite spirit as natural 
spirit identified with God, this is sheer pantheism. The Church declares 
that only through the death of the natural man can he be united with 
God" (Philosophic der Religion, vol. i, p. 211). 



Theology, Anthropology, and Pantheism. 207 

the immobile Brahm or of the blind Will of the Uni- 
verse. 

Hegel's doctrine is that God is eternally self-con- 
scious and can never be other than self-conscious. It 
has nothing to do with time. It is the " form of eter- 
nity." Men's consciousness rises to this as they rec- 
ognize God as their Father, and his will as their own 
will. Their consciousness of him becomes ^^"-con- 
sciousness. They are complete in him, God having 
reconciled them unto himself, the ultimate purpose of 
his creating them being to reflect and complete his 
eternally complete self-consciousness in them. Until 
man reaches this perfection he is not himself. He is 
bad by nature and good through grace, prevenient, 
circumambient, permeating, and sanctifying ; bad as 
merely conscious and opposed to God, good as his 
self-consciousness is completed in his perfect recon- 
ciliation with God. Evil is an essential element of 
mere consciousness, and " the prodigious labor of the 
world's history " is the progress of man, through Di- 
vine grace, into the freedom of self-determination, 
making God's will his will, thus realizing self-con- 
sciousness and completing God's self-consciousness 
or perfect reflection of himself in his sons. Here 
Hegel as well as Christianity is transcendental as re- 
gards the world of time and sense. Both carry us out 
of and above the temporal and visible to the eternal 
and invisible. Both look upon man sub specie ceterni- 
tatis. 

Hegel's doctrine of the creation, as springing from 
the love in the triune nature of God, involves a re- 
lation to humanity which may be called a natural or 
an essential tendency to incarnation. Here he gives 
the Scotist view. This tendency became actualized 



208 Philosophy of Religion, 

in the man Christ Jesus, the true organic head of 
humanity. Hegel considers the incarnation as the 
central doctrine of Christianity on its temporal, his- 
torical side, as he considers the doctrine of the Holy 
Trinity the central one on the God ward side. He 
also explicates the work of the Holy Spirit in the 
Church, in the perfecting of its members as a body, 
realizing in them God's reconciliation of the world to 
himself in Christ. Here " the important element," 
he says, "is the certitude of the individual subject of 
its own, infinite, unsensuous essence, knowing himself 
to be infinite, eternal, and immortal" (ii, 312). The 
Holy Spirit is the immanent life of God in the Church 
militant working toward a transcendent life in the 
Church triumphant. Pantheism has no place for per- 
sonal immortality. But Hegel's Philosophy gives 
the most exalted conception of the place, worth, and 
destiny of immortal mortals. Deus nos personat now 
and forever. With Hegel personality is immortality. 
It is the end of the journey toward God, to such 
realized self-consciousness that God can say, " In you 
I am well pleased, I am reflected in you." Hegel 
extols the Egyptians for having so profoundly con- 
ceived the thought of immortality. Dr. W. T. Harris 
says, " It is a profound mystery to us how any one can 
express a doubt as to Hegel's belief in the immor- 
tality of the soul, for this may be considered to be 
the subject-matter of Hegel's entire philosophy." 
He accounts for such doubts by the fact that " Hegel 
is known more through the traditions of his oppo- 
nents than by faithful study of his own works" 
(Journal of Speculative Philosophy, v, 88). Hegel 
is always engaged with showing what is immortal 
and what is not immortal throughout the universe, 



Theology, Anthropology \ and Pantheism. 209 

and that is concrete personality. He maintains that 
immortality is a quality of mind which is already 
present and need not first be mediated, as it also can 
not be destroyed, by death. Of course, he does not 
allow that we can form any valid picture-conception 
of the conditions of our existence after death. He 
would reply as St. Paul did to the query, " With what 
body do they come?" " Thou fool" (1 Cor., xv, 36). 
Goeschel is rightly considered as the best exponent 
of Hegel's own contention that philosophy is the 
same in content as evangelical Christianity. He 
published a volume on " The Proofs of the Soul's 
Immortality " (translated in the Journal of Specu- 
lative Philosophy, xix, xx), from which I quote only 
one passage : 

This concept of soul-permeated corporeality has, how- 
ever, its presupposition in Personality ; this Personality we 
have recognized as the concrete concept of Spirit ; only in 
the light of this concept is the body transfigured and trans- 
parent. This transparent corporeality in its final analysis 
is the obedience of the body to the soul in the spirit — an 
obedience which is free, because identical with that which 
determines it. The final consummation is the obedience of 
the creation toward God in God. Therefore, it has been 
said that all the paths of God end in corporeality. 

The " non omnis moriar" of pagan hope is changed 
into the Christian assurance of the resurrection of 
the body " in incorruption," " in glory," " in power," 
" a spiritual body," though " flesh and blood can not 
inherit the kingdom of God "(1 Cor. xv, 42-50). 

As opposed to modern enlightenment, which 
deems God freedom and immortality, dreams of chil- 
dren and uncultured men, we read in every part of 



210 Philosophy of Religion. 

Hegel these words of Novalis : " Philosophy can 
bake no bread ; but she can procure for us God, 
freedom, and immortality." 

Such pantheism is Hegel's in common with the 
Catholic saints of head and heart of all ages. Such 
pantheism is far higher Christian theism than that of 
the mechanical deisrn> which too commonly masquer- 
ades as orthodoxy, deceiving and belittling its own 
self and its disciples. Surely this gospel, according 
to Hegel and the saints, is far higher than the gospel 
according to both Mansel and Spencer. 

Deistic orthodoxy is temporarily compatible with 
that " sober, common sense, unemotional, anti-myste- 
rious type of religion that soon dies of dry-rot, not 
being rooted in the soil of the immanent Deity. True, 
vital, exalting and impulsive religion always needs 
the incoming and indwelling of that higher pantheism 
of the immanent Holy Spirit." 

Hegel called his philosophy that of Absolute Ideal- 
ism. He was, like St. John, a born Platonist, and, like 
St. Paul, a converted Aristotle. " The ideal is the real, 
and the real is the ideal." Dr. Erdmann calls it 
Panlogism. 

Hegel has been criticised for over-emphasizing 
the thought, the X070? in all things, and for not empha- 
sizing sufficiently the elements of will and love. But 
he conceives all thought as the voluntary outgoing of 
Love on its return to Love : 

Denn das Leben ist die Liebe, 
Und des Lebens Leben Geist. 

God is Love in all his works. Hegel read this 
immanent Love into the form of thought (Xoyo?) as 
identical with real being (ov). All such thinking be- 



Theology, Anthropology, and Pantheism. 211 

gets the loftiest and purest emotion. Intellectual 
ecstasy merges into ecstatic union with the Divine — 
intellectual comprehension of the incomprehensible 
love of God humbles and exalts us infinitely. 

If Jacobi's reading of Kant's moral argument for 
the existence of God could raise sufficient emotion 
to bring on a violent fit of palpitation of the heart, 
surely the study of Hegel — of nearly every one of 
his works — will both humble and exalt the soul with 
floods of devotion, and wing its flight heavenward, 
as do both St. John and that Christian before Christ, 
Plato. Nor can one doubt that, with Hegel himself, 
this work of thinking the thoughts of God after him 
was a genuine act of devotion. These are his own 
(spoken) words: Das Denken ist auch wahrer Gottes- 
dienst. 

Note. — I have elsewhere (p. 64) referred to these pregnant words as 
possibly legendary. I have since had it on good authority that Hegel's 
wife vouched for their genuineness. He was a good German churchman, 
but not a constant church-goer. Frau Hegel once remonstrated with 
him for not attending public service more regularly, instead of spending 
so much time at intellectual work. He replied with unaffected serious- 
ness, " Thinking is also genuine worship." 



CHAPTER VI. 

THE METHOD OF COMPARATIVE RELIGION. 

Comparative Religion would have seemed su- 
perlative blasphemy to Christians of the early part 
of this century. To-day it is recognized as one of 
the sciences which is most fruitful in its aids to faith. 
It is not yet, however, entirely free from elements of 
irreverence and skepticism. In fact, the most subtle 
attempt to desupernaturalize Christianity — to reduce 
it to a merely natural though lofty product of the 
religious spirit of man — comes from this sourceand 
sharpens its weapons upon its material. This is one 
of the chief forms of attack that apologetics must 
face to-day. 

The historical method of investigation, which, 
applied to the New Testament writings ofttimes to 
destroy their genuineness and authenticity, has re- 
sulted in such fruitful triumphant Christian scholar- 
ship — this same method is now applied to the study 
of all religions, ofttimes, too, in the interest of skep- 
ticism. We believe that it is already resulting in 
most fruitful scientific and philosophical vindication 
of Christianity as emphatically the revealed Religion. 
Skepticism here, as so often, leads the way into new 
fields. Christian scholars, sometimes trembling, fol- 
low to claim all the new truth discovered and to lay 
it at the feet of Jesus. Thus this investigation, this 



The Method of Comparative Religion. 213 

study of the great religions of the world, becomes a 
department of apologetics. The supernatural char- 
acter of Christianity is to be vindicated by argu- 
ments that come from the historical investigations 
and comparison of the religions of the world. 

A slight sketch of the rise and progress of this 
work may be of interest, and also show that Chris- 
tian scholars and missionaries have been most help- 
ful in the work, it having been closely connected with 
the kindred science of comparative philology. 

We might begin with the Renaissance and the 
Reformation. The first of these revived knowledge 
of classical literature and made men thoroughly fa- 
miliar with the religion of Greece and Rome. The 
latter gave the spiritual impulse and the intellectual 
freedom which have been at the root of all modern 
progress. Another century saw the dawning knowl- 
edge of the great religions of the East, obtained 
through travelers, missionaries, and commercial in- 
tercourse. It was this faint knowledge that was 
sufficient to lead the freethinkers of France to sug- 
gest the setting up of Buddha, Confucius, Zoroaster, 
and Mohammed as rivals to the founder and apostles 
of Christianity. Every noble doctrine and moral 
excellence was attributed to the Oriental religions. 
Voltaire very naively attributed the superiority of 
the Chinese in morals, philosophy, and general cult- 
ure to their ignorance of Christianity. Nothing else 
was needed, to put an end to all the miseries and 
disputes of his day, but the adoption of the Chinese 
religion throughout Europe. 

In the latter part of the eighteenth century (1783), 
Sir William Jones began the real work of revealing 
the great literatures of the East. His was the envi- 



214 Philosophy of Religion. 

able vocation of adding a whole continent of litera- 
ture to Western wealth. A born philologist and 
lover of truth, like a young knight-errant, his enthu- 
siasm rose to the level of his wonderful linguistic 
capacity. About the same time (1771) Anquetil du 
Perron, whose spirit and work were no less enthusi- 
astic and much more romantic, opened to Europe 
the treasures of Persian literature. These leaders 
have ever since had devoted followers, profiting by 
all the modern means of investigation. Then Protes- 
tant missionaries, who, however, had been anticipated 
by Romish missionaries, began the accumulation of 
an enormous amount of ethnological and philologi- 
cal material ; missionary dictionaries, grammars, and 
translations gave the apparatus for the study of many 
unknown languages. French, Danish, and German 
scholars in an illustrious succession have labored on 
the same continent of learning. 

The discovery of the Rosetta stone in 1799 was 
the key which Champollion used for unlocking the 
vast religious literature of Egypt, therewith opening 
the door to a library of monuments and papyri in 
myriads of volumes. A very romantic and impress- 
ive outcome of the study of Persian literature is that 
the modern disciples of Zoroaster — the Parsees of 
India — were first furnished with the meaning of their 
own sacred books through the labors of European 
learning. Until 1859 their language of worship was 
an unknown tongue. On the publication of Spiegel's 
translation, a wealthy Parsee gentleman, living in 
England, had it rendered into English and sent to 
his fellow-worshipers for use in Bombay. In fact, 
the whole course of these twin studies — comparative 
philology and religion — would make volumes of 



The Method of Comparative Religion. 215 

thrilling romance. The result is, that we have a 
large and scientific material for the appreciative and 
comparative study of the faiths of the world. This, 
too, is now made accessible through the editing by 
Max Miiller of The Sacred Books of the East in 
twenty-four volumes. But, with all this, and abun- 
dantly more material, the task of judging justly these 
foreign religions is a difficult one. The personal 
equation comes in here, as elsewhere, to the prejudice 
of just comparison and truthful appreciation. This is 
seen in the three methods, or stages of method, of 
this study, which we may style the eighteenth-century 
Christian view, the old skeptical view, and the new 
scientific and Christian view. 

I. The eighteenth-century view was that all the 
religions of the world except Judaism and Chris- 
tianity were false religions, the result of wickedness, 
priestcraft, delusion, fanaticism, or quackery. All 
other religions were disparaged, that the Christian 
apologist might the better exalt and prove the super- 
natural origin of Christianity. This a priori view 
did not encourage a proper study of them. Indeed, 
in its special pleadings, the evils, rather than the 
truths, were eagerly sought for in them. The rigid 
line of distinction between the converted and the 
unconverted in Christendom was extended into the 
classification of all religions as " Natural and Re- 
vealed," " False and True," or " Paganism and Chris- 
tianity." Christianity was the wholly true, and hea- 
then religions were the wholly false. They could 
not be considered as having any Divine significance. 
They were worse than no religion. They were cor- 
rupt, superstitious, and the offspring of fraud and 

delusion. The utmost allowed to them was the ut- 
20 



2 1 6 Philosophy of Religion. 

terly perverted and darkened light of a primeval 
revelation. This preconceived theory held that all 
false religions were corruptions of the Jewish re- 
ligion or offshoots of a perfect primeval revelation, 
which had come down from heaven ready made for 
perfectly developed man. But, all remnants of that 
having utterly disappeared, there was nothing true in 
them, and no true faith exercised by their believers. 

II. The eighteenth-century skeptics cheerfully ac- 
quiesced in ascribing the origin of these religions to 
delusion and fraud, only going further and placing 
Christianity in the same category. But this view of 
the origin of Christianity by skeptics and of all other 
religions by Christians has, I believe, once for all been 
abandoned. The relation of priestcraft to religion 
is found to be that of statecraft to nations — not that 
of creating, but that of created. Carlyle utters this 
fervid protest against the theory of quackery in 
reference to paganism and every other virile ism : 
" Quackery and dupery do abound ; in religions, 
above all in the more advanced, decaying stages of 
religions, they have fearfully abounded ; but quackery 
was never the originating influence in such things ; 
it was not the health and life of such things, but their 
disease, the sure precursor of their being about to 
die. Let us never forget this. It seems to me a 
most mournful hypothesis, that of quackery giving 
birth to any faith even in savage men. Quackery 
gives birth to nothing ; gives death to all things. 
We shall not see into the true heart of anything, if we 
merely look at the quackeries of it, if we do not re- 
ject the quackeries altogether as mere diseases and 
corruptions." In the same spirit he retorts upon 
those who claim that Mohammedanism owed its tri- 



The Method of Comparative Religion. 217 

umph solely to the sword, " But where did it get its 
sword? 1 '' Faith forged its sword and was the inspi- 
ration of its first armies. 

Scholarly skepticism soon gave up this flimsy, un- 
worthy, and irreverent view of Voltaire, and began 
the course which we may represent as these three 
stages: 1. That of looking for the good, true, and 
beautiful elements in all pagan religions. 2. That of 
tracing the origin and growth of all religion to the 
lowest forms extant — finding its ultimate source in the 
sensuous needs, the timidity, and terror which char- 
acterize the most barbarous tribes, so as to cast dis- 
credit upon it in all its later forms. 3. Its latest and 
best phase, which, while finding the source of all 
religions in its lowest forms, generously, sometimes 
genuinely, maintains that its real value is not to be 
determined by its empirical origin or by the accidents 
of its outward history, but by its own inherent worth 
— by that to which it developed from very humble 
beginnings, making sacred anthologies, bestowing an 
ignorant admiration upon them in place of the sweep- 
ing condemnation of Christian writers ; seeking thus 
to depress Christianity the rather by exalting them 
to its level, or at least maintaining that Christianity is 
nothing more than a synthesis of the good and also 
of some of the evils of all previous religions. Evolu- 
tion can do as great things for man's religion as it 
can for man himself. Mr. Herbert Spencer's arti- 
cle* on "Religion; a Retrospect and Prospect," is 
the best statement of this phase of the modern skep- 
tical view. He deliberately proposes the Ghost-the- 
ory origin of religion, and follows through its various 

* The Nineteenth Century, 1884. 



218 Philosophy of Religion, 

stages of evolution even to the far-off future millen- 
nium of the agnostic absolute religion. The man's 
ghost, or double, is at first " equally material with the 
original." This is gradually dematerialized or dean- 
thropomorphized into the present conceptions of God, 
which process is to go on until all conception is 
destroyed, and the idea sublimated in the unknow- 
able, unnamable something or nothing which the 
coming agnostic man w T ill nevertheless worship as 
truly and devoutly as his barbarous gnostic progeni- 
tor worshiped fetiches. 

III. This brings us to what we may call the mod- 
ern Christian scientific method. We might call it 
the Christian view of organic evolution. It is Spen- 
cer's evolution minus its materialism and plus a 
Divine Evolver. It is the Hegelian evolution of the 
free personality of both God and man. It is that of 
organic evolution, with all that the adjective organic 
signifies, and with all the primary and continuous in- 
volution that every evolution implies. We may ac- 
cept the fact that the method of organic evolution is 
the method of the nineteenth century. We may be 
thankful for its merit, and use and baptize it with the 
Spirit of Him whose is all truth. We start, then, 
from the basis of the Christian consciousness, which 
has been formed by the facts of historical Christianity, 
applied and inwrought by the Holy Spirit through 
the Christian centuries. It is the view of the Divine 
indwelling in the whole historical evolution conduct- 
ing it to its conclusion. Its view-point of the faiths 
of the world is that of the Divine education of the 
race — the evident Providence in history. This fruit- 
ful idea, broached by Lessing, and anglicized by 
Bishop Temple, though hooted at by Orthodox, 



The Method of Comparative Religion. 219 

Evangelical, and Tractarian, is now regnant. But it 
is not wholly modern. It was the cherished view of 
the fathers of the Alexandrian school. Clement, 
who Neander says was the founder of the true view 
of history, opposing those who condemned all pagan- 
ism as wholly false, declared that all the good in 
heathen religions " must, therefore, be included with 
all the rest in God's plan of education for the human 
race " ; that Greek philosophy as well as the Jewish 
religion was a positive preparation* for Christianity. 
Speaking of the progressive steps in the Divine edu- 
cation of humanity, he represents the Logos as the 
Oelos TrcuBar/coyos, declaring : " All men belong to him, 
some with consciousness of what he is to them, 
others as yet without it ; some as friends, others as 
faithful servants, others barely as servants." The 
doctrine of the whole school was that God had re- 
vealed himself to all nations by his Logos, Chris- 
tianity being his highest revelation, or a pleroma. 
Even earlier, Justin Martyr employed this view for 
setting forth Christianity as the central point, where 
all the hitherto scattered rays of the Godlike in 
humanity converge — the absolute religion, in which 
all that has thus far been fragmentary and rent piece- 
meal, is brought together into a higher unity, and for 
comparing- all the partial and alloyed revelations of 
the X070? 7rpo<f)opLfcb<; with the full and unalloyed reve- 
lation of the absolute, Divine Logos in Christ. Thus 
early, then, we find the science of comparative re- 
ligions starting from the standpoint of the Christian 
consciousness. Thus the method of comparison was 
one of the apologetic tactics of the Greek Fathers 
of the Church. And the standard of comparison was 
the Christian consciousness. The comparative re- 



220 Philosophy of Religion, 

ligious content of every pagan religion was its frag- 
ment of the pleroma of Christianity. 

We may well accept this revived Christian method 
in this study. This method may be called a priori — 
a philosophy rather than a science. But it is both. 
For no science is without its metaphysical element, 
its intellectually vivifying principle, even if it be so 
bathetic as the philosophy of the Unknowable. 

Let us, however, turn aside to notice briefly this 
method on its inductive side. The scientific study 
of religion consists in observation of facts, compari- 
son of views, induction of principles and verification 
of these principles from the course of history, and, 
finally, the connected synthesis of all these results in 
a supra-scientific view — in a Philosophy of Religion — 
though this term may be objected to by both skeptic 
and Christian. Certain phenomena are by general 
consent classified as religious. These are to be noted, 
and, when occurring in different bodies of people, to 
be compared with each other, to see what they are, 
wherein they agree, and where they differ. It is 
primarily a department of natural history. All re- 
ligious facts are to be noted, whether enshrined in 
the form of myths, legend, story, dogma, ritual, or 
life. All its visible or historic phenomena are to be 
collated. Then comparison inevitably follows — a 
comparison of the sacred books, the teaching about 
God, duty, immortality, prayer, sacrifice, and life. 
It is to study these facts dispassionately, to aim at 
doing justice to all phases of this manifestation of the 
human spirit — to study them in the spirit of a judge, 
rather than that of the special pleader. This precludes 
the supposition that any form of religion is wholly 
false. It demands that we take an interest in the 



The Method of Comparative Religion, 221 

study of each one of them — an interest that is sure 
to come and increase with continued study. It de- 
mands a hospitable mind, that esteems everything 
human of interest. But thus science must pass on 
from this analytic to its synthetic stage. Deeply 
impressed by the fact that man is eminently and 
everywhere a religious being — that the highest and 
truest history of any nation or age is the history of 
its religion — the student of this science unavoidably 
finds himself trying to generalize definitions of re- 
ligion, God, revelation, that are either implicit or 
explicit in all religions. From Religions he passes by 
synthesis to Religion, and then turns back upon his 
previous study to read the laws of its development — 
to read its course either as a progressive Divine reve- 
lation and education, or as the necessary dialectic of 
the idea. Development of some kind is assumed by 
all. We may call it the nineteenth-century postulate 
in regard to all life and institutions. It is the phi- 
losophy that underlies its science, the metaphysic of 
all its physics. Thus all, Christian or skeptic, are 
led unavoidably from the mere science of Religion 
to a Philosophy of Religion, which indeed is im- 
plicit, and vitalizes its every form as a science. 

But the contest with the skeptic is not here, as it 
is not with the facts collated and classified by the 
science. Indeed, we may go further, and yet not be 
at the real issue. All comparison both presupposes 
and produces a standard of comparison. That stand- 
ard we may say is Christianity, and not be challenged 
by any one. All grant that Christianity is the highest 
and best form of religion — the standard of comparison 
for measuring all others. Christ is formally at least 
invited to the highest seat in the world's Pantheon. 



222 Philosophy of Religion, 

Before noticing more at length the method and 
its results, we may briefly indicate the crucial point, 
whence issues in theory the life or death of all re- 
ligion. 

It is when we ask, What is religion, what its cause, 
subject-matter, worth, reality, and final end ? Skep- 
tics say in fact, though often in most graceful and 
euphemistic periphrasis, that it is wholly an illusion, 
beneficent or baleful, a necessary product or a para- 
sitic excrescence of human life. The question, What 
is religion ? must and will be asked ; and to be an- 
swered it must pass through the laboratory of science 
and the crucible of philosophic intelligence. Has it 
an imperishable substance of reality, or are its visible 
forms only held up by the sand-ropes of illusion, 
prejudice, and ignorance? Has it concrete reality, 
or is it, as with Herbert Spencer, only apotheosized 
ignorance ? And thus it merges into the larger ques- 
tion, which includes that of the reality of all our 
knowledge — into the ultimate philosophic question of 
knowing and being. The answer divides thinkers to- 
day into the two schools of skepticism and faith, of 
total agnosticism and of partial but real gnosticism, 
without which God, the world, science, and philoso- 
phy are dead, and the inexplicable puppet man ought 
to cease to think, speak, and be. Silence unutter- 
able is the only becoming companion of ignorance 
absolute. 

But leaving agnosticism, which has no defense, no 
root or ground in the universe, we take the other 
philosophical view of Natural Realism, or of the real- 
ity of knowing and being, in a concrete organic nexus 
of living relations. Being, knowledge, life, all of 
these imply and may best be viewed under the 



The Method of Comparative Religion. 223 

method of development — the process of vital, or- 
ganic, progressive relations. 

We may be told that we have only finite knowl- 
edge and being. But real answer is made when we 
show that our finite portions are not isolated, but 
that they are in organic connection with their correl- 
ative, infinite and absolute being and knowledge — 
that man and man's history have never been isolated 
from his other infinite side of being, that his connec- 
tion with Absolute Spirit has been as real and con- 
tinuous as his connection with the earth — that in God 
all men have lived and moved and had their quantum 
of real being. The mechanical isolation of God, the 
world, and man, the complete and essential separation 
of concrete man from Absolute Spirit, of his self-con- 
sciousness from the element of God-consciousness, this 
old, barren, mechanico-logical view, which is respon- 
sible for much intellectual skepticism, can no longer 
be held. Real logic is found to be a process, and is 
manifested in all life and not in the forms of the syl- 
logism. Man's being and knowledge are processes 
in organic relation to God. These relations are im- 
plicit in every man's life, but come into the conscious 
experience gradually. We need not reply to the ex- 
clamation, " What an assumption ! " when it is that 
which alone gives reality to anything; when it is 
positively given in self-consciousness and its implica- 
tions. 

It is in this implicit organic relation of man with 
God that we find the root of religion. From this we 
may educe a definition of religion and trace its con- 
scious evolution or " coming to itself," in the histor- 
ical life of the race, with which it is conterminous. 

We may briefly define religion as the conscious 



224 Philosophy of Religion, 

relation of man to God. We may amplify this and 
say that it is the process of man's coming to full real- 
ization of the implicit relations of his own conscious- 
ness — the process of man's feeling after God and find- 
ing him, in whom all live and who is not far from, 
but in organic relation with, every one of his own 
offspring, though they worship Him ignorantly. It is 
the surrender of the partial, isolated self to its truer 
self — the striving after real life in conscious identity 
of mind and will with the Divine, that the old, false, 
fragmentary self may no longer live but give place 
to the realization of the perfect life — its native dower, 
its forfeited birthright. It is the truest life of man 
in communion with God, attempts after which give 
various expression to that latent consciousness of an 
Infinite Being and Life which is bound up with man's 
very nature as a rational and spiritual being. 

But all this definition gives only one side, and that 
the finite side, of the religious relation. If we are in 
organic relation with God and seek to realize this, if 
we seek after the living God, it is no less true that 
God seeks after us his offspring, seeks to manifest his 
part of the vital relation, to reveal himself unto us. 
He does not sit in the inaccessible heavens and watch 
us vainly striving to fall upward to his feet. God is 
not foreign to man his creature — his wisdom and love 
are in vital relation with him, for of him, and through 
him, and in him are all things. If man's spiritual 
nature can only fulfill or realize itself in union with 
God, there must be some vital relation of God with 
man. Of an organic relation, all parts are vital ; and 
this is the truth slighted alike by deist and pantheist 
and many professedly Christian writers upon the 
philosophy of religion. 



The Method of Comparative Religion. .225 

Combining the two sides, we may better define 
religion as the reciprocal communion of God and man. 
It is the product of this double attempt to realize this 
organic relation. But its Godward side is its deep- 
est and strongest — God striving to so manifest him- 
self to us that we may know, love, and live in him. 
Revelation is, therefore, a constituent of all religion, 
and is an historic process as well as man's side of re- 
ligion — a process that includes the revelation to pri- 
meval man, the continuous natural revelation through 
nature, history, conscience, and life, and all special 
revelations — all manifestations of the infinite Divine 
side of man's environment. 

This definition of religion is the product of the 
study of the various religions, and in turn the test to 
try the measure and worth of each and its place in 
the progressive development. That there has been 
an organic development of religion the Christian 
much more than the skeptic is bound to hold. That 
there has been a providential control of the religious 
experience of mankind means, too, that there has 
been an order of progress — " first the blade, then the 
ear, afterward the full corn in the ear." The relig- 
ious experience of the world, followed intelligently 
through its historic manifestations, gives us the stages 
of this evolution, of what was from the beginning in- 
volved in man's destiny or true nature. At any step 
in any phase of this experience we may put this 
measuring test, How much divine light and love and 
how much human response to it is to be found here ? 
We may begin at the lowest recorded stage, though we 
may never begin at the ultimate origin, which neither 
tradition nor historic research can penetrate, and 
trace its course to its fullness. But this does not im- 



226 Philosophy of Religion. 

ply, and research does not show, that this process is 
identical with the successive phenomena of religious 
history of particular races or with the chronological 
order in which the various religions have succeeded 
each other. The colligation of facts is only the pri- 
mary step in the science of religion. Then comes 
interpretation, or the finding of intelligence, order, 
progress — the eliciting the hidden presence of rational 
relations, of an objective reason, of God's activity — 
in the collated and compared religious facts of the 
world. Every science starts with the presupposition 
that its subject-matter is intelligible, that there is rea- 
son or thought in it which it seeks to exegete. The 
student of the religious experience of mankind makes 
only the same presupposition. He traces the steps 
of this intelligence by viewing his material in the 
light of the definition of essential religion, and by 
comparison with it he determines the relation of the 
various religions to each other. 

This gives him the true classification of religions 
instead of the prejudiced classification of " natural 
and spiritual," or the arbitrary and inadequate divis- 
ion into " polytheistic and monotheistic." Passing 
by all external and arbitrary resemblances, which oft- 
times are most wonderful, and all differences, which 
ofttimes are only dialects of expression, we ask, to 
what extent each religion fulfills or realizes the fun- 
damental idea of religion ? The answer determines 
the moment in the process that each represents ; and 
the working out of the answer is the task of the com- 
parative study of religions involving a detailed ex- 
amination of the religions of the world. The labors 
in this work have been abundant, Dr. J. Freeman 
Clarke, in his sympathetic study of The Ten Great 



The Method of Comparative Religion. 227 

Religions, gives a good bibliography on this science. 
It is sufficient to refer to his list of authors and works, 
including those given in the preface of Part II of this 
valuable work. 

To this definition and method of religion, two 
objections will be raised. The first is that the idea 
of an organic development of religion reduces it to a 
merely natural growth and gives no assurance of its 
objective truth. This arises from the materialism 
and the pantheism that have largely but wrongly 
claimed the method as their own. With them there 
is no place for the free personality of God and of 
man. It becomes merely a physical or a metaphysical 
process of necessary development. But to yield the 
method to these now almost united views, is neither 
wise nor right. The organic unity of the free per- 
sonality of God and of man leads to an organic de- 
velopment of this relation in historic processes which 
are neither merely physical nor metaphysical, but 
are concrete freedom. We have risen far above the 
old theological antinomy between God's sovereignty 
and man's freedom. The solution, or rather the 
comprehension, of this antinomy is essentially also 
that of this question of an organic development of 
religion. It is identical with it. 

The second objection to this method will come 
from its implying an essential relation between Chris- 
tianity and other religions — an incorporation of 
Christianity into the unity of the idea and the history 
of religion. This objection is overstated when it is 
asserted that this view reduces Christianity to the 
level of other religions, or at least implies that it is 
the result of their synthesis. But this it need not 

and does not imply. Christianity is easily differenti- 
21 



228 Philosophy of Religion, 

ated from other religions even under this method, 
as the absolute religion, in the sense of being the 
perfect realization of the idea which underlies and 
gives significance to all others. All Christians claim 
that Christianity stands in organic connection with 
Judaism, both being parts of a gradually developing 
system, and draw from this one of the strongest 
arguments for the Divine origin of Christianity. 
But can we refuse to extend this connection in some 
degree to other religions? If the heathen nations 
were subject to a providential training, if God was 
in their history in any degree, as all grant, is not 
this relation essentially granted? Rome's work of 
the unification of mankind and Greece's work of phi- 
losophy have indeed always been allowed to come 
into this organic connection, but only, as it were, by 
a side door. As a matter of fact, the Greeks and 
Romans were found more ready to receive Chris- 
tianity than were the Jews. It was this that startled 
the apostle St. Paul, who soon came to recognize a 
true seeking and finding through an ignorant wor- 
ship of God underneath their superstition. It will 
not do to eviscerate his speech on Mars' Hill by 
pronouncing it " a masterpiece of ingenuity and elo- 
quence." He believed what he said. 

Indeed, the extending of this connection to others, 
besides Judaism, only strengthens the argument for 
the Divine origin of Christianity. Not only Judea, 
but the whole world, becomes a theatre for prepara- 
tion for it, the whole order of human history pointing 
to Christ, who was the true " desire of all nations." 
Philosophy demands this, and much more does the- 
ology ; for the doctrine of God, as Light and Love, 
without whose notice not even a sparrow falls to 



The Method of Comparative Religion. 229 

the ground, necessitates us to take it, and thus to read 
the history of all religions as the record of his mani- 
festation and of man's very imperfect apprehension 
and acceptance. God can not be wholly banished 
from any human history. Christian apologists to-day 
point out how Christianity meets " the unconscious 
longings of heathendom," and trace anticipations of 
Christian doctrine and guesses at truth in pre-Chris- 
tian religions. It is even allowed that their vitality 
came from some lingering elements of a primeval 
revelation. It is also pointed out that Christ came " in 
the fullness of times." Divine Providence is allowed 
to have made external preparations for his advent, 
such as the facilities that the Roman Empire and the 
Greek language afforded for the diffusion of Chris- 
tianity. But, as another has said, " It is surety not 
a less reverential view, to trace a deeper preparation 
in the movements of men's minds, in the convergence 
of manifold spiritual tendencies, in the gradual dis- 
cipline of the human consciousness for the reception 
of the universal religion," and in the gradual human 
apprehension of Divine truth in the various religions. 
It is a shallow and irreverent conception which re- 
gards all pre-Christian seeking after God, and all 
pre-Christian seeking of God after men, as abortive 
experiments, the outcome being utter failures and 
worse than no religion, and their preparation for 
Christianity merely negative. The method of com- 
parative religion will not admit this conception. 
Neither will it admit nor does it involve the conces- 
sion that there is nothing more in Christianity than 
a synthesis " of pre-existing elements, or that its 
originality consists simply in the reproduction, in 
collective form, of ideas contained in the religious, 



230 Philosophy of Religion. 






philosophical, and ethical systems of the ancient 
world." In reply to such a conception of Chris- 
tianity, Dr. John Caird * has well said that " it is not 
more historically improbable than it is inconsistent 
with the true idea of organic development, which is 
absolutely antagonistic to any such a notion as that 
Christian doctrine is a mere compound of Greek, 
Oriental, and Jewish ingredients. To apply the 
ideal of development to human history is by no 
means to find in the old the mechanical or efficient 
cause of the new. For, in organic development, the 
new, though presupposing the old, involves the in- 
troduction of a wholly original element not given in 
the old. Hence we are not to conceive that Chris- 
tianity could be elaborated out of pre - Christian 
religions and philosophies, any more than that life 
could be elaborated out of inorganic matter. But 
the connection of Christianity with the past, which 
we here assert, is a connection which at the same 
time involves the annulling and transmuting of the 
past by a new creative spiritual force. To assert it, 
therefore, is to hold that Christianity neither borrows 
nor reproduces the imperfect notions of God, be 
they pantheistic, dualistic, or anthropomorphic, in 
which the religions of the old world had embodied 
themselves. In the light of this idea we can perceive 
these imperfect notions yielding up, under the trans- 
forming influence of Christianity, whatever elements 
of truth lay hid in them, while that which was arbi- 
trary and false falls away and dies. Thus, whatever 
elements of truth, whatever broken and scattered 
rays of light the old religions contained, Christianity 

* Philosophy of Religion, pp. 354, 355. 



The Method of Comparative Religion. 231 

takes up into itself, explaining all, harmonizing all, 
by a Divine alchemy transmuting all — yet immeasur- 
ably transcending all — * gathering together in one all 
things in heaven and earth ' in its * revelation of the 
mystery hid from ages • the revelation of One who 
is at one and the same time Father, Son, and Spirit 
— * above all, through all, and in all/ " 

Indeed, it is not without supposing the human race 
to have been annihilated and a new race created, out 
of all connection with the former, as the recipient of 
Christianity, that we can think of it other than as 
being essentially, organically related with the whole 
antecedent course of man's religious life. This meth- 
od does not prejudge either how much or how little 
real movements of the process are found in any 
of the pre-Christian religions. It does not, indeed, 
assert a priori that Christianity is the absolute re- 
ligion, the pleroma, which fulfills all religions as it 
does Judaism, with something infinitely above them, 
though implicit in the lowest. But this we may say 
is a result, granted by all, of a fair comparison — a 
result, too, from its fulfilling the definition given of 
religion. Being the concrete idea of religion, it thus 
becomes, like it, the standard of comparison. Nor 
can it, as the absolute religion, be divorced from its 
historical origin. The facts of the Apostles' Creed 
will ever continue to be the basis of its special apol- 
ogy. For comparative religion is all in the air, when 
it leaves the concrete historical basis, at any moment 
of the process. But being, in its historical manifes- 
tation, the absolute religion — that is, the perfect 
realization of the idea which underlies and gives 
significance to all religions — Christianity becomes 
the concrete standard of comparison. We thus pass 



232 Philosophy of Religion. 

from the assertion that Christianity can not be fully 
understood unless viewed as an organic relation to 
ethnic religions, to the assertion that these can only be 
understood when viewed in relation to Christianity — 
that Christianity is the only religion, from which, and 
in relation to which, all other religions may be viewed 
in an impartial and truthful manner, and their signifi- 
cance as steps in the process of the revelation of the 
ideal and true relations of God and man be appreciated. 
Wherever there is any religion there is some revela- 
tion. In the absolute religion there is perfect revela- 
tion, which subsumes all previous revelations and pass- 
es on to special revelation, in the whole historic setting 
of the Incarnation — the perfect union of God and man. 
The implications, inferences, illustrations, and the 
present results of the application of this method in 
the study of the " faiths of the world," are as innu- 
merable as they are interesting. But notice of these 
is the work not of an article or series of articles, but 
the appropriate task of the great science of compara- 
tive religion. These indeed are as interesting as the 
statement of the method may seem dull. But the 
method is necessary to the attainment of the best and 
truest results of the science. A false method is culti- 
vated in this science which yields anti-Christian and 
even atheistic inferences — which issues not in life but 
death. But this is due to false method, not to the 
real character of the study itself, which is a realm of 
human experience demanding study. For the sci- 
ence is an overwhelming demonstration, not only that 
man was made for religion, but also of the perfect re- 
ligion for which he was made, and which was made 
for him — realized and being realized for him as briefly 
set forth in the creeds of the Church. 



CHAPTER VII. 

CLASSIFICATION OF THE POSITIVE (PRE-CHRISTIAN) 
RELIGIONS. 

The previous essay on the Method of Compara- 
tive Religion was written before I had read Hegel 
on this topic. It may, however, be fairly styled 
Hegelian in method and spirit. Hegel makes ex- 
tended notice of the various positive (bestimmte) re- 
ligions in his Philosophy of History, translated in 
Bonn's Library. In his Philosophic der Religion he 
devotes a large part (Part II) to an explication of 
these religions. After having worked out the general 
idea {Begriff) and content of religion (Part I), he turns 
to the study of the various inadequate forms in which 
this idea has been embodied. He notes what part, 
member, or moment of the true idea of religion each 
one of the great world religions embodies — how each 
one of them dimly perceives and emphasizes some 
isolated element of the idea, or rather how the idea 
itself embodies itself in these inadequate forms. His 
method and work have been of the greatest value, 
really the inspiration and guiding method of all that 
has recently been accomplished in the study of re- 
ligions. Moreover, as both Prof. Max Muller and 
Prof. Sidgwick affirm, the present predominance of 
the historical method in all departments is largely due 
to the influence of Hegel. This must not be inter- 



234 Philosophy of Religion. 

preted to mean that Hegel was merely an empiri- 
cist, or that his Science of Religion was merely a Sci- 
ence of Religions, but only as abating the charge that 
he was wholly an a priori expositor. He first grasped 
the fundamental idea of religion through the Chris- 
tian conception of it, then watched the dialectic pro- 
cess by which this idea determined itself in various 
forms, and illustrated these forms by their corre- 
sponding external or positive manifestations. 

The Science of Religions has gathered and classi- 
fied very much additional knowledge of these various 
positive religions, which would modify his use of them 
as illustrations of the moments of the idea. This is es- 
pecially true of the lower forms, or Natur e-r€i\g\oxi% 
while his characterization of the Greek, Jewish, and 
Roman religions remains wonderfully significant. He 
would have admitted that the Science of Religions 
must modify the descriptive or illustrative portions 
of the Science (Philosophy) of Religion, while he 
would deny that it could change its method — i. e., 
that of the self-explication of the idea of religion. 
This idea is absolute, and is itself a living process of 
self-explication or of organic development, entering 
the world of time and space and embodying itself in 
various historical forms, but always with immanent 
finality, present in the lowest forms and gradually 
advancing through more adequate ones till it reaches 
that of Christianity. 

A merely empirical study of the various religions, 
tracing them back to their historical origins, never 
adequately apprehends them. It is merely dealing 
with the temporary and accidental elements of the 
idea beneath which is their true reality. This idea is 
the organic relation of God and man. As Aristotle 



Classification of the Positive Religions. 235 

long ago announced, the true first cause is the final 
cause of each and of all that is. The idea is implicit 
in and uses all the merely empirical causes for its 
own purpose. The historical origin is always itself 
caused by the idea. Living thought is immanent in, 
and truly causal of all, that exists and develops. It 
is not only true that whatever is must be transmuted 
into thought before we can know or understand it, 
but it is also true that without thought was nothing 
made and nothing exists that does exist. 

The thought of things is their reality. We know 
them when we have brought them into our system of 
thought. The thought of the architect is the reality 
of the cathedral rather than its stones and mortar. 
So, too, the mere stones and mortar — the wood, hay, 
and stubble — that form so large a part of every posi- 
tive religion, including historical Christianity, are not 
the real foundation or the gold, silver, and precious 
stones which the fire eternal that trieth all things 
temporal shall find enduring. The real cause or ori- 
gin of all religions is not the empirical antecedents 
and surroundings of its historical appearance, but the 
idea {Begriff) of religion itself in the mind of the Abso- 
lute Idea (Idee). The last in time is first in thought, 
the 

one far-off divine event 
To which the whole creation moves. 

The study of religions is too often the ineffectual 
search for their temporal sensible origins. But Phi- 
losophy seeks for the origin of these origins, for their 
essential ideal, vital, creative origin in thought, of 
which they are only moments or representations of 
its moments. Thought, while identical with real be- 
ing, is also prior to the sensible, positive, inade- 



236 Philosophy of Religion. 

quate forms of real being. Temporal evolution only 
evolves the involved idea. The involved vital idea 
the rather evolves itself. Any other conception of 
evolution is both blindly fatalistic and chaotic. All 
the empirical conditions of the plant do not explain 
its origin and growth. It grows according to its idea. 
Man may have historically developed from lower 
forms of sensible existence — from protoplasm — but he 
is now, or rather is now being, developed according 
to his idea and not according to the idea of a plant or 
an animal. He is a man " for a' that and a' that," and 
not an anthropoid ape. Thus, too, no form of religion 
is explicable by all the empirical origins and condi- 
tions that history may discover. The history of re- 
ligion presupposes and finds the idea of religion 
throughout. 

The various positive religions are the self-posited 
determinations or differences of one and the same 
idea ; and the Philosophy of religion is the Science, 
the intelligent recognition of the idea in its various 
self-posited differences. The various religions are 
sensible representations of these different moments 
of the idea. We may say that actual, historical Chris- 
tianity is the sensible, positive form or illustration of 
the absolute religion. We may decline to affirm that 
historical Christianity, as a positive form of religion, 
is identical with the absolute or revealed religion. 
It is the representation in positive form of the abso- 
lute religion. Its idea is the idea of religion ; but in 
no time or place or form has it been identical with 
it. This is simply the Christian view of the Church 
on earth as being the Church militant, looking for- 
ward to its final realization as the Church triumph- 
ant. It is only saying that the Christianity of men 



Classification of the Positive Religions, 237 

has always been profoundly inferior to the Chris- 
tianity of Christ. The Christianity of any age, of 
any sect, of the Catholic Church of all ages, is inade- 
quate to its idea. In idea it is the absolute, the revealed, 
the ultimate religion. In its actual realization of its 
idea, it is still seen in the process of development, 
with all the distortions and limitations which all his- 
torical development implies. 

So it may be said of the various positive religions. 
They are not only inadequate to the idea, but they are 
also inadequate representations of the subordinate 
phases or moments of the idea which they illustrate. 
The method of the self-explicating idea is an illumi- 
nating, revealing torch that we may carry with us as 
we dig among the ruins of antique religions. It is a 
key to their ciphers that renders them intelligible. 
The thought of God and of man's relation to him is 
the soul and key of all religion. Christianity is ulti- 
mate and absolute in its idea of real organic union 
between Personality and personalities, and thus be- 
comes the standard of comparison by which to meas- 
ure and grade the phase of truth and error in all 
others. This standard of comparison is the idea of 
Christianity, and not its actual, positive manifestation 
in either Romanism or Protestantism. There have 
been phases of both these positive forms so very in- 
adequate to the idea of religion as to repel wise men 
from the East in quest of a nobler religion than their 
own. Thus it has been possible for an educated man 
to write, " Why I am a Buddhist, and not a Chris- 
tian." Thus it has been possible for Japanese study- 
ing Christianity in London to return home and ad- 
vise against its adoption, because inferior to Bud- 
dhism in good works. But the Christianity of Christ 



238 Philosophy of Religion. 

is sublimely superior to that of men. It is the idea of 
Christianity that is absolute and ultimate, and so the 
standard of comparison. 

There are different methods used in the study of 
religions to-day. There are two correct methods, 
the historical and the philosophical, and two false ones 
which are perversions of the true ones. Mere empiri- 
cism is the exaggeration and caricature of the histori- 
cal, and abstract ideology of the philosophical method.* 

The empirical method studies religions as a branch 
of natural history of human weakness. It compiles 
masses of information as to the positive forms that 
religion has assumed in cultus, dogma, and practice 
at different times and places. It tries to get back to an 
£/r-religion, and trace the growth of the human mind 
to 7ft?-religion as a progress into freedom. This is a 
perversion of the historical method, which also starts 
from the phenomena of religion, but seeks to trace 
through them both an intellectual and moral progress. 

No human institution ever dropped ready made 
from heaven. Everything has grown, developed. 
Even the Ten Commandments had a history, and there 
were historical preparationes evangelicce for the advent 
of Christ. The various stages of the growth and 
development of religion are searched out, and the 
successive environments which have coaxed or forced 
the rude germ into higher forms are noted. One 
phase is compared with another. Goethe's famous 
maxim as to languages is appropriated, and reads, 
"He who knows one religion only, knows none." 
Each is related to the others — springs out of them 
either by force of kinship or of hostility : 

* Cf. Bluntschli, Theory of the State, p. 5. 



Classification of the Positive Religions. 239 

All are needed by each one, 
Nothing is fair or good alone. 

Too often the historical method contemplates all 
creeds, and holds none ; but often it is thoroughly 
penetrated by the philosophical method, and becomes 
its supplementing and correcting handmaid. 

On the other hand, abstract ideology, a priori 
theory, doctrinaire conceptions scorn the empirical 
and historical and evolve all from within. They only 
ape while caricaturing the philosophical method. 

This true method seeks the real, the rational in the 
actual. The ideal side, the moral and spiritual life 
of the positive historical forms, engages its attention. 
It is concrete thinking, uniting together ideas and 
facts. It looks before and after, and seeks the indis- 
soluble organism of thought, the Logic of all life. It 
can not move without history. But it gives history 
its philosophy. It interprets facts and history, but 
is not overwhelmed by the mere mass, nor confused 
by the manifold complexity that these afford. 

Such is the method of Hegel in his study of the 
Positive religions. Having tried to comprehend the 
idea of religion and its necessity, he proceeds to in- 
terpret the mass of information gathered by em- 
piricism and the historical method, in the light of 
this living, self-differentiating, and self-unifying idea. 
He follows the history of religion as the vital organic 
evolution of the idea in positive forms, asking what 
element of religion each religion represents, in order 
to give to each one its comparative philosophic con- 
tent. The idea of religion as the reciprocal com- 
munion of God and man may be viewed from either 

side. On the one side, we have men so created by God 

22 



240 Philosophy of Religion. 



far 



" that they should seek the Lord, if haply they might 
feel after him and find him, though he be not far 
from every one " of his offspring. On the other 
hand, we have God seeking men, loving and coming 
" unto his own," lightening " every man," pleading 
with men, laboring with the might of omnipotent 
love to bind his children in organic union with him- 
self. On the one hand, we have man seeking to find 
his true self in God, to become complete in him ; to 
come to the full, self-conscious personality of a son 
of God. On the other hand, we have God seeking 
to find himself, to realize himself, to complete his 
self-consciousness by reconciling men unto himself, 
that he " may be all in all." Religion is thus God's 
effort to reveal himself to men so as to win them to 
himself in love, and man's effort to receive and live 
by this revelation. 

This gives the essential basis for the classification 
of all forms of religion. Ask of each one as we find 
it in history, how has God been able to reveal himself 
to men through it, and how has it enabled men to ap- 
proach, love, honor, and obey God ? How has each 
one realized this idea of religion ? What conception 
of God does each one supply ? And then, is there- 
traceable through them all a progressively more ade- 
quate conception of God and realization of the idea of 
religion ? Is there an organic development of the 
manifestations of the idea, corresponding to the in- 
herent essential phases of the idea itself ? Is there a 
common element or life running through them all, 
from the lowest to the highest, ever dying to old con- 
ceptions to live in new and higher ones, until Chris- 
tianity appears as the manifestation of the full con- 
tent of the idea, the manifestation of the Absolute re- 



Classification of the Positive Religions, 241 

ligion that absorbs, annuls in fulfilling and transcend- 
ing all the partial attempts of God and man at living, 
loving, organic and eternal union ? All these ques- 
tions Hegel would undoubtedly answer in the affirm- 
ative. His conception of religion demands it, and 
his treatment of religions implies it. 

Before giving his classification of religions I 
wish to note (1) some implicit corollaries; and (2) 
some other classifications of the religions of the 
world : 

1. A history of religions is the necessary subject- 
matter of a philosophy of religion, and a philosophy 
of religion is necessary for any Science of Compara- 
tive Religions. Religion is as old as man qua man. 
It is an implicit, essential part of his nature. It 
assumes local and temporary forms ; is modified by 
climate, geography, and race. It is sometimes allied 
with the most inhuman barbarities, and sometimes 
with transcendent ethical life. Philosophy interprets 
the religion there is in all these diverse manifesta- 
tions. It measures their content by the idea of re- 
ligion. The Science of comparative religion can not 
move a step without the aid of Philosophy. It tells 
Science what phenomena are religious, gives the 
standard of comparison, and helps to interpret and 
classify them. It is to this science what mathematics 
is to astronomy, making it to be more than a mere 
mnemonic tabulation of religious phenomena. It 
really gives to the current theory of evolution the 
imperfect method which it uses. It contributes 
the idea of organic development, which evolution, 
however, uses in an empirical and mechanical way. 
For this follows at best the analogy of a physical 
organism even in its study of spiritual organisms. 



242 Philosophy of Religion. 

It debases the spiritual necessity of self-determina- 
tion to the physical necessity of external compul- 
sion, and thus vitiates all its results. Such is the 
central vice of the method used by Spencer and the 
whole school, in the study of man, social, ethical, and 
religious. The doctrine of Evolution is no longer in 
the air. It is in everything. It has come, seen, and 
conquered large realms of knowledge, and has come 
to stay. It has come to modify many traditional 
conceptions of God, man, and the world. Hence the 
need that it be rightly conceived and applied. 

Spencer's evolution may well be styled Hegel's 
philosophy turned upside down, or an inverted pyra- 
mid. Hegel starts from spirit and traces its movement 
away from and back to itself throughout creation. 
Spencer starts from the matter or force unknowable, 
but is forced onward in ever-increasing nearness to 
spirit. But he is always cramped and confined by 
his non-spiritual starting-point, and never raises man 
above the form of the sphinx — half brute, half human 
— spirit struggling to tear itself loose from nature 
without more than partially succeeding. In the study 
of religions his school agrees with Heraclitus that 
" Religion is a disease, though a noble disease." It 
finds religion at the cradle of every nation, and agnos- 
tic philosophy at its grave. Hegel finds religion as 
essential to man as man. No religion, no man — mere 
brute. Perfect religion, perfect man — the Son of 
God. Between these two are the diverse forms of 
religion in organic relation, culminating in the incar- 
nation as the manifestation of the idea of absolute 
and perfect religion. There is a progressive reve- 
lation, and a progressive reception of it, and not a 
mere progress out of religion. 



Classification of the Positive Religions, 243 

Such a philosophic conception is necessary to be- 
get that true, tolerant, and sympathetic study of the 
lowest forms of religion. This tolerance springs from 
confidence in spirit working everywhere to its ulti- 
mate self-conscious realization. It does not fault the 
seed because it is not the tree, or the uncomely parts 
of the body because they are not the comely parts. 
It seeks to recognize the place and worth of each 
element of the spiritual idea struggling back to spirit, 
person to Person. A famous utterance of Lincoln may 
justly be adapted so as to characterize Hegel's spirit 
in the study of religions : " With malice toward none, 
with charity toward all, with firmness in the right as 
God gives us to see the right, let us strive " to gather 
up and synthesize the element of truth in every relig- 
ion, in the unity of the Holy Spirit and in the bonds of 
peace. He who knows but one religion, knows none ; 
and he who knows the ultimate one rightly, knows 
all others as absorbed, annulled, transmuted, con- 
stituent elements of it. So to study them is to find 
them convincing evidences of Christianity, evidences 
of that Power which is not, and which is, ourselves 
working throughout the ages to reveal and realize 
our divine kinship — sonship. This is "the mystery 
which in other ages was not fully made known to the 
sons of men." Only in " the fullness of times " are all 
things seen to be gathered together in one in Christ, 
and Gentiles recognized as fellow-heirs and of the 
same body. 

No need, then, to depress pre-Christian religions 
in order to exalt Christianity. No need to mini- 
mize the light which lighteth every man. No need 
to fear to recognize " every good gift and every 
perfect gift as from above." No need to fault Justin 



244 Philosophy of Religion. 

Martyr for attributing inspiration to the Sibyl, or 
Clement of Alexandria for drawing no distinction 
in kind between the inspiration of the sacred writers 
and that which he believed to have been imparted to 
the great Greek philosophers. No need to decline 
to see the testimonium animce naturaliter Christianice 
in the great and good of all religions. No need to 
deny the " light that shineth in a dark place, until 
the day dawn and the day-star arise." Better say, 
with Clement and Origen, that the night of paganism 
had its stars to light it, and that they called to the 
morning star that stood over Bethlehem ; that God 
has never forsaken or ceased to be the God of the 
heathen. No need to use the theological fiction of 
a primitive, supernatural, and perfect revelation of 
which all forms of paganism are but the corruptions. 
Such a theory is not only without biblical founda- 
tion, but is also disproved by all the results of his- 
torical and scientific study, as well as being a priori 
unlikely. It assumes that man was naturally un-re- 
ligious, and that religion must be implanted, ready- 
made, and perfect from without. As well assume 
that language and art and science and social institu- 
tions were thus imparted by a primitive revelation. 
Better say that man is by nature religious, seeking 
after the Lord as the Lord seeks after him. No need 
to make the Jews the only nation not forsaken by the 
Lord. Grant them all their special privileges and 
attainments, but do not refuse to recognize the divine 
training of other nations for the advent of the perfect 
religion to fulfill all things — Jewish and Gentile — in 
the fullness of times. Study them all as " landmarks 
on the road humanity has followed in its return to 
God who awaits it — rather let us say to the God who 



Classification of the Positive Religions. 245 

comes to meet it." * History and science, as well as 
philosophy, emphasize the essential unity and soli- 
darity of the religious consciousness in man. The 
formations of the great religions of the world repre- 
sent great crises of religious experience — the work 
of Infinite love and patience being continually tried 
by the failure to fully reveal itself in winsome form 
to its own offspring : 

They are but broken lights of thee, 
And thou, O Lord, art more than they. 

The Divine Spirit, the great Oversoul, has always 
borne witness in the under-souls of all flesh. To deny 
this seems to be as positive atheism and inhumanity 
as the dead ancestor or ghost theory of the origin of 
religion. 

As opposed to the false, unscientific views spring- 
ing from the theological bias, the eighteenth-century 
rationalists had also their false and unscientific theory 
and classification. They abstracted some supposed 
rational truths from concrete religious phenomena 
and labeled them natural religion. All else they de- 
cried as superstition or the invention and tool of 
priestcraft and statecraft. This was later followed 
by another reaction against the theological classifica- 
tion into true and false religions, and all religions 
were regarded as equally true. Similarities and re- 
semblances were sought for and diversities ignored. 
Sacred anthologies were made from the ethnic Bibles 
to show that all religions were nearly equally good — 
Jehovah, Jove, and Lord, were different names for the 
same God. Happily, all these unscientific views and 

*Pressense, The Religions before Christ, p. 13. 



246 Philosophy of Religion. 

classifications are now effete. One would as soon 
think of classifying nations or languages as true and 
false or as natural and unnatural or as all equally 
good. 

Hegel has thus censured this last view : " In 
every religion there is a Divine presence, a Divine 
relation ; but it does not follow that because it is a 
religion it is wholly good. We must not fall into the 
lax conception that the content is of no importance, 
but only the form " (Philosophy of History, p. 204). 

2. All modern classifications of religions may be 
termed historico-scientific, largely leavened with the 
philosophical element. Max Muller contends for the 
ethnological classification, following that of language, 
into the Aryan, Semitic, and Turanian. Prof. A. Re- 
ville adopts the severely criticised classification of 
Polytheistic and Monotheistic, including under the first 
all but Judaism, Christianity, and Islamism (History 
of Religions, p. 98). Prof. J. Freeman Clarke follows 
the classification of religions into that of Tribal, Eth- 
nic, and Catholic. Prof. Kuenen confines his attention 
to National {Ethnic) and Universal (Catholic) (The Hib- 
bert Lecture, 1882, p. 3). 

Prof. W. D. Whitney classifies them into National 
and Individual, or race religions and those proceeding 
from an individual founder. The principle of the 
one is nature, that of the other is ethics. The former 
are generally local and the latter catholic. By all 
students there is an effort to give a morphological clas- 
sification. Prof. Pfleiderer gives the classification into 
(1) Naturistic, Ethnic, and Catholic. Prof. C. P. Tiele 
includes all under the same morphological classifica- 
tion as Prof. Whitney — i. e., Nature religions and 
ethical (Individual) religions, though previously pro- 



Classification of the Positive Religions. 247 

posing and using the following classification : (a) An- 
imism ; {b) Polytheistic national religions ; (c) Nomis- 
tic religions, founded on a law or sacred writings ; 
and (d) Universal or world religions which start from 
principles and maxims.* 

From all these we may generalize the following as 
the accepted historico-scientific classification of relig- 
ions. It leaves the primitive £/r-religion to psychol- 
ogy and philosophy to determine. That is /^-histor- 
ic. (1) Naturism, including animism, fetichism ; (2) 
Tribal ; (3) Ethnic ; and (4) Catholic religions. In no 
department has the modern historical method been 
more faithfully, ardently, and resultfully applied than 
to this study of religions. With glad»mind and heart 
have its students found this study of man in his re- 
ligious activity the most intensely interesting and re- 
warding. Man is by nature a religious being. Such 
is the verdict of its research. Starting as mere em- 
pirical positivism, collecting and tabulating religious 
phenomena, the Science of Religions has come to find 
a vital current throbbing organically throughout the 
essential unity and solidarity of the religious con- 
sciousness of man. It has found, like all other sci- 
ences of human activity, that it can not tarry in the 
realm of mere physics ; that its physics implies a met- 
aphysics ; that there is everywhere present a differ- 
entiating and synthesizing universal, which both cre- 
ates and interprets the mass of particular religious 
phenomena. In other words, it finds religion as the 
union of man and God to be an organic development, 
member bound to member, each stage containing 

* Cf. Tide's History of Religions and Encyclopaedia Britannica, arti- 
cle Religion. 



248 Philosophy of Religion. 

while annulling and transforming the lower and less 
perfect ones, and all living realized and contained as 
organic members in the ultimate and true religion — 
that is, each and all are viewed in the light of the 
fundamental idea of religion, and this means that the 
Science of Religions has unavoidably been led to rec- 
ognize that it is really the philosophy of religion that 
has been inspiring and guiding its study to its richest 
results. Thus, the historical process of religion, its 
evolution in historical conditions, is seen to be a 
process of thought, an unfolding, self-explication of 
the idea of religion. 

This brings us to Hegel's philosophico-scientific clas- 
sification which he gives in the division {Eintheilung) of 
the positive religions.* This classification begins with 
the idea of religion and follows the logical develop- 
ment of this idea as illustrated and manifested in the 
positive religions, each one being recognized as a mo- 
ment or element of the idea itself. All other classi- 
fications are external and mechanical. This classifi- 
cation is the movement, the act itself of thought, of 
the idea which differentiates and reunites its differ- 
ences in their organic unity. It is, indeed, only be- 
cause any one religion is a difference, a member of a 
unity, that it can be classified. If it has nothing in 
common with other religions, if it is a difference out- 
side of religion, if it is totally a false religion, then it 
is an outcast from all classification. Every religion 
included in the classification must realize and express, 
however faintly, the idea of religion. Religion is the 
mutual relationing of God and man. The idea of God 
is fundamental and fontal. Reconciliation or vital re- 

* Philosophic der Religion, vol. i, pp. 255-262. 



Classification of the Positive Religions, 249 

lationship is the motive of all religions, with how- 
ever much extraneous matter this central motive 
may be allied. Each one is a specialization, a more 
or less imperfect manifestation of the idea of religion, 
which is only finally and fully realized in Christian- 
ity. Christianity is the true and perfect religion, not 
because it excludes all others, but because it includes 
them. It came to destroy by fulfilling them all — by 
filling up their poor little conceptions with the full- 
ness of the truth. 

The lowest savage is a man. He manifests the 
idea of man. The idea is in him, making him as 
much of a man as he is ; but he is not perfect man, 
not the fully manifested idea of man. Only in the 
God-man is the idea of man and of religion fully 
realized. At first man is only implicitly man, and 
religion is only implicitly religion, according to its 
idea. It is of the earth earthy. The implicit, un- 
developed form of the idea is like all undeveloped or- 
ganisms — homogenous. Hence the lowest form of 
religion is that of nature-religion. Here the conscious- 
ness has not yet distinguished its object from its sen- 
suous self. The object is immediate and identical with 
its sensuous self. The manifold indeterminate objects 
of nature are worshiped. The subject has not yet dis- 
tinguished himself from his own sensuous existence. 
When this step is taken, when the idea enters its first 
stage of differentiation, the subject also distinguishes 
the essence of nature from its sensuous form. God 
becomes transcendent. Hegel thus makes the dis- 
tinction between nature-religions and the religion of 
spiritual individuality the center of his classification. 
Otherwise stated, this distinction is that of substan- 
tiality and subjectivity in God. He distinguishes all 



250 Philosophy of Religion. 

pre-Christian religions by this antithesis (1) Nature- 
religions and (2) Religions of spiritual individuality, be- 
tween which he places a class of religions in transition 
to spiritual individuality. 

I. Nature-religions comprise : 

{a.) Immediate sensuous religion, the magic and 
witchcraft of savages. 

(b.) The disruption of the religious consciousness 
in itself. Here the subject still considers himself as 
a natural sensuous existence, but opposes to himself 
a substance or essence of nature. He is nothing: 
nature as substance is all. But this implied eleva- 
tion above the merely natural is not fully developed. 
Consequently, we have a mingling of the natural and 
spiritual, as seen in — 

(#'.) The religion of measure of temperate conduct, 
secular life — the Chinese. 

(&'.) The Religion of Phantasy, of inebriate dream- 
life — Brahmanism. This is a pantheism of imagina- 
tion rather than of thought. This leads to universal 
deification of the objects of nature. Its mythology is 
a wild extravagance of fancy. Brahm is anything 
and everything and nothing. 

{c'.) The religion of Being-in-itself, or of self-involve- 
ment. The all is nothing, and man must make him- 
self nothing by his own might in order to become 
this all, this nothingness. Buddhism is the return of 
the negative spirit upon itself. The man Buddha is 
its ideal and becomes its God in place of the essence 
of external nature, the Substance of Brahmanism ; but 
it is the Buddha who has universalized himself into 
that quiescence which can only come when all indi- 
vidual desires and aims and the thralldom of things 
of time and sense are renounced as evil. 



Classification of the Positive Religions. 251 

(c.) This contest between the natural and the spir- 
itual leads to the contest of subjectivity. Pantheism 
is falling before the increasing consciousness of the 
individual. Yet the spirit has not yet subjugated the 
natural. 

Under this we have three forms : 

(#'.) Parseeism, the religion of the Persians. This 
is dualism, or the antithesis of light and darkness. Its 
god has yet the form of a natural object, or rather of 
a formless object — Light. The principle of this tran- 
sition is that the Universal Essence which we recog- 
nized in Brahm now becomes perceptible to con- 
sciousness and acquires a positive import for man. 
Man, too, becomes free, separate from the universal, 
though a partaker in that essence; but darkness is 
yet a felt power warring against the good and to be 
warred against by men. The world has not yet been 
reduced to unity ; but the conflict has begun, and 
with this begins strictly the world-history which is 
to culminate in perfect freedom. " In contrast with 
the wretched hebetude of spirit which we find among 
the Hindoos, an exhilaration of spirit meets us in the 
Persian conception." Spirit emerges from its substan- 
tial unity with nature as found among the Hindoos. 

(b'.) The religion of Pain — that of the Phoenicians 
and Syrians. 

(<:'.) The religion of Enigma — the Egyptian. He- 
gel regards the Sphinx as the symbol of the Egyp- 
tian spirit. Spirit has still, as it were, an iron band 
around its forehead. It does not attain to free con- 
sciousness of its existence. This is its problem, its 
enigma. But in its doctrine of immortality, which 
first appeared among the Egyptians, is involved the 
inherent infinitude of spirit. 
23 



252 Philosophy of Religion. 

II. Religions of freedom, or of spiritual individual- 
ity. These rise above nature in the thought of a 
Final Cause : 

{a.) Of the absolute might and wisdom of the one 
God, who made nature, and consecrated from among 
the nations one to his exclusive service. Among the 
Jews we find the spiritual entirely purified and freed 
from nature ; the pure product of thought. This 
forms the separation between the East and the West. 
We pass clear from Substance to Subject. "Spirit 
descends into the depths of its own being, and recog- 
nizes the abstract fundamental principle as the Spir- 
itual. Nature is now depressed to the condition of a 
mere creature, and Spirit now for the first time oc- 
cupies the chief place. God is known as the Creator 
of all men, as he is of all nature, and as Absolute 
Causality." * Spirit is all, nature is merely external 
and undivine. Spirit, which had hitherto been dis- 
honored, here first attains its due dignity. But, like 
all protestantism, it goes too far. " Nature is undei- 
fied, but not yet understood." At a more advanced 
stage only can the Idea recognize itself in this alien 
form of nature. But true morality and righteous- 
ness now for the first time make their appearance. 
And yet the severe religious ceremonial hampers 
the concrete freedom of the individual. Absolute 
Spirit is not yet fully revealed, and hence concrete 
individual personality can not fully realize itself in 
the Absolute. Hence the lack of a belief in the im- 
mortality of the soul. It is the patriarchal family, 
the nation, which is of substantial and imperishable 
worth. 

* Philosophy of History, p. 203. 



Classification of the Positive Religions. 253 

{b.) The religion of the free cultivation of individ- 
ual perfection — that of the Greeks. 

(c.) The religion of universal political dominion — 
that of the Romans. 

Hegel also characterizes these three thus : (a.) 
The Jewish — the religion of sublimity, (b) The 
Greek — the religion of Beauty, (e.) The Roman — 
the religion of prosaic conformity to an end. " The 
prose of life appears here." 

The study of religions since Hegel's day undoubt- 
edly compels considerable change to be made in the 
characterization that Hegel gives of some of them. 
But it does not change or invalidate the method, 
which can readily adapt itself to any amount of new 
information as to religious phenomena. The idea 
passes through these phases, and is indifferent as to 
just what one religion shall represent any one phase. 
They are all inadequate to the idea. They are all 
false so far as they claimed finality, and all true so far 
as they embodied and illustrated any phase of the 
idea. They failed and died, as everything imperfect 
must; but in and through them the human spirit 
had been educated beyond them, and prepared for 
the full revelation of Absolute Concrete Spirit in — 

III. The Christian religion, in which the idea at- 
tains its adequate reality. This is the last, the high- 
est, the ultimate, the religion of the perfect at-one- 
ment of the human spirit with the Absolute Spirit. 
It is the religion of truth, because in it spirit has 
spirit for its object. It is the religion of freedom, be- 
cause in it the "other" of both God and man has 
been transformed into phases of self-consciousness. 
Through the incarnation in Jesus Christ the union of 
the Divine and human spirit has been accomplished, 



254 Philosophy of Religion, 

the goal of creation attained. God is recognized as 
concrete personal Spirit, only when he is known as 
triune. " This new principle is the axis on which the 
history of the world turns. This is the goal and the 
starting-point of history." But this only appears 
" when the fullness of the time was come " (Gal. iv, 4). 
The mystery of preceding stages was now " made 
known unto the sons of men that in the fullness of 
times he might gather together in one all things in 
Christ, both which are in heaven and which are on 
earth, and that the Gentiles should be fellow-heirs 
in the same body " (Eph. i, 10, and iii, 5, 6). Thus 
Christianity, as the Absolute and the Revealed relig- 
ion, is the truth of all which preceded it, and in vital 
organic relation with them. Such is the conception 
of Hegel. He first * attempted this unification of all 
religious phenomena in history, and a permeation of 
them by one principle and one method. However 
much, 1 have already said, his characterization of va- 
rious religions as illustrations or manifestations of 
phases of the one essential, vital idea may have to be 
corrected by new information as to the history of 
these religions, his method and principle seem to be 
ultimate. 

Christianity contains the fully developed and syn- 
thesized elements of truth of all preceding religions. 
Not one of them was absolutely false. All were in- 
complete — some as rudimentary as the lowest form 
of organic matter is compared with man. All had 
their roots in the needs of humanity estranged from 
God, yet seeking after him who has never been far 

* Puenjer says that Hegel's is the first complete system of a philoso- 
phy of religion (History of Christian Philosophy of Religion, p. 2). 



Classification of the Positive Religions, 255 

from every one in seeking after them. All have 
contributed to the education of the race, though 
often temporarily contributing to the degradation of 
some parts of it. It is not necessary to overlook this 
debasing side of religion, when allied with crime, 
war, persecution, sensuality, and arrogance.* And 
it is necessary to pronounce all imperfect ones false 
when they arrogate perfection to themselves. But 
it is also necessary to seek for the vital kernel that 
animates them both for good and evil, to discover 
the living root whence they have sprung, whose dis- 
tortion forms their evil; to find the phase of the 
idea of religion that they represent, and to trace their 
slow modifications by which they perish only to sur- 
vive as subordinated elements of a larger phase ; to 
find fragments of truth, dismembered, partial, and 
dying in the effete religions of humanity, and true 
religion in none of them. It is also necessary to 
trace how they die as systems to live as members of 
a larger system ; to trace the lineage and genealogy 

* " Religion builds by turns, and fires the world — in its pureness the 
ornament and strength of society, in its perversion the scandal and 
scourge of nations. It supplies the first rudiments of society ; it fore- 
casts the social destination of man ; leader in all progress ; vanguard of 
all stability ; source of revolutions the most prevailing ; champion of the 
boldest adventures ; pioneer more eager than commerce ; explorer more 
patient than science. Religion is acknowledged the mistress of arts. 
She reared the temples that make Egypt venerable, and the marbles that 
made Greece renowned. While gratefully acknowledging the multifold 
service of the great benefactress, we can not forget that religion has been 
the worker of evil. No agent that has wrought in earthly scenes has 
been more prolific of ruin and wrong. The wildest aberrations of hu- 
man nature, crimes the most portentous, the most devastating wars, per- 
secutions, hatred, wrath, and bloodshed, more than have flowed from 
all sources besides, have been its fruits " (Hedge, Ways of the Spirit, 
P. 36). 



256 Philosophy of Religion. 






of each new one containing these elements ; to trace 
the continuous vital idea that lives and increasingly 
realizes itself in and through, thus annulling and 
fulfilling them. 

Each member is worthy of study, though not of 
equal worth. One is truer, more adequate than 
another. One may be a vessel unto dishonor, another 
one unto honor. Both the historical method and the 
theory of evolution yield their best results from being 
vitalized with this philosophical conception of move- 
ment by affirmation, negation, and absorption of the 
old into the new. It is on stepping-stones of dead 
ancestors that we rise to higher things, and have an 
inheritance to preserve, increase, and transmit. A 
philosophy of religion should aim at finding the logic 
of the life of the religious consciousness in all phases 
of its manifestations, stripping off the external, acci- 
dental elements and expressing in terms of thought 
the process of development, the ultimate kernel of 
each, after the chemistry of time has dissipated the 
unessential circumstances. The stages in the evolu- 
tion may seem to some to follow each other by acci- 
dent or by mechanical necessity. Each one is utterly 
refuted. Truth is nowhere, even in part. Truth is 
not living, vitalizing all. The result is a museum of 
the aberrations of the human spirit, a pantheon of 
dead gods. 

When any living organic progress is thus denied 
to the history of religion, its study hecomes the most 
comfortless and disheartening. It asks the profane 
question of Pilate, " What is truth ? " It answers 
with the equally profane words of Macaulay, " Who 
are the wisest and best, and who is to be the judge 
of that?" It banishes life, love, spirit, God from 



Classification of the Positive Religions. 257 

the world. It turns cosmos into chaos. But phi- 
losophy is thought, reading living, loving, thought 
everywhere, especially in religious phenomena. It 
is the reading of the dialectic of love, annulling, ab- 
sorbing, fulfilling its inadequate forms toward the 
goal of adequate form and self-revelation. It reads 
God in religious history. Because it sees God fully 
revealed in the Christian religion, it can also see 
him faintly revealed and apprehended in the lower 
forms which Christ annulled and fulfilled " in the 
fullness of times." 

Christianity, though the highest and ultimate form 
of this organic development, is not merely an ex- 
ternal summation of the preceding ones. It is not 
merely a "golden thesaurus" of the best elements 
in all of them. Though every petition in the Lord's 
prayer, and every sentence of the sermons of our 
Lord on the mount and in the temple and valleys 
and on the sea, could be found in the Bibles of 
other religions, yet would Christianity be other and 
greater. No such artificial patchwork could faintly 
resemble the living coherent organism of Chris- 
tianity. A mausoleum for ghosts might thus be 
constructed, but not a living temple of the Holy 
Spirit for living worshipers. It is in no such 
merely mechanical way that Christianity contains 
and fulfills all preceding religions. We may grant 
all the valuable results obtained by Bauer and his 
school in the study of the origins of Christianity. 
We may thankfully accept all the moral, religious, 
and intellectual elements that they show to have 
been waiting in the great alembic of the Roman 
Empire at the advent of Christ, and yet maintain 
that the new life is beyond the analysis of histor- 



258 Philosophy of Religion, 

ical chemistry, as all life is beyond the formula of 
chemistry. 

The originality of the character and work of 
Christ is the most easily maintained of historical 
theses. Genealogy, environment, the invention of 
loving disciples, genius, mythology, it is not too 
much to say that all these have confessedly failed to 
account for "the great surprise of history," whom 
" all men seek." Reverently speaking, he was a pro- 
vincial man, born in the smallest nation, and among 
the narrowest people, never traveled as a " citizen of 
the world," never read universal history, nor studied 
the classics of the Gentiles, and yet he was neither 
Jew nor Greek nor Roman, but man. Nor was he 
the mere copy of any Messianic idea, Jewish or Gen- 
tile. Nor was he the creation of loving disciples. As 
Theodore Parker was forced to say, it would take a 
Jesus,* to forge a Jesus ; or, as another puts it : " We 
know that they could not have originated it, as we 
know that Peter could not have chiseled out of mar- 
ble the beauty of the Apollo Belvidere, or Paul have 
painted that wonder of art, the Sistine Madonna." f 
All the world wondered and still wonders at that man, 



* The whole passage from Parker is worth recalling : " Consider 
what a work his words and deeds have wrought in the world. Remem- 
ber that the greatest minds have seen no further, and added nothing 
to his doctrine of religion, that the richest hearts have felt no deeper and 
added nothing to the sentiment of religion, have set no loftier aim, no 
truer method than his, of perfect love to God and man. Measure him 
by the shadow he has cast into the world — no ! by the light he has shed 
upon it. Shall we be told such a man never lived, the whole story is a 
lie ? Suppose that Plato and Newton never lived. But who did their 
wonders, and thought their thoughts? It takes a Newton to forge a 
Newton. What man could have fabricated Jesus. None but Jesus." 

f Rev. Newman Smythe, Old Faiths in New Lights, p. 225. 



Classification of the Positive Religions. 259 

the goal of creation. Yet it is possible, nay necessary, 
to hold this doctrine — of Christ as incarnate God — 
and at the same time to connect Christianity or- 
ganically with all preceding religions and cultures. 
Hegel affirms not only the necessity of the incarna- 
tion as the completion of the creative purpose, but 
also maintains that it was accomplished, and could 
occur only once for all, in the man Christ Jesus.* 

Thought will not stop short of this conception of 
the organic development of religion, including all 
forms of its manifestation. And Christianity is not 
degraded but exalted by this view which makes it 
the culmination of the development, the complete 
ideal realization of what religion is. It is only when 
the figure of the mechanical development of a physi- 
cal organism is used in place of that of a spiritual 
organism, that we can rightly object to it. The time 
has passed when it was considered derogatory to 
man to trace his physical antecedents to lower forms 
of life. We speak of man as a microcosm, contain- 
ing in transmuted form all phases of lower physical 
existence. But he is a man for all that, and not a 
stone, or tree, or animal. It is only so far as he has 
yet the elements of the lower, untransformed in him, 
that we find him degraded. If he has yet a stony 
heart, a wooden head, and merely animal motives and 
aims, he is like a miniature sphinx, an imbruted man. 

We trace the growth of architecture through a 
succession of crude conceptions manifested in rude 
forms, till the great architect appears who annuls 
and fulfills all lower conceptions in giving birth to 
the ideal cathedral embodied in stone. Without 

* Philosophy of History, p. 337. 



260 Philosophy of Religion. 

them he and his work could not appear. No human 
thing drops ready-made from the skies, not even 
Christianity itself. Christ did not first become " the 
light of the world " eighteen centuries ago. Christ 
is, and is not, the great surprise of history. The sur- 
prise would be greater if he had not come in the full- 
ness of times to fulfill the constitutional Christ-want 
of humanity. The incarnation is not unnatural nor ac- 
cidental. It was natural and necessary, considering 
the nature of God and his creative idea. It is the com- 
pletion of the self-necessitated creation and revelation 
of the triune God. And completion implies a begin- 
ning and a process. First, this is seen in the earthly 
life of Jesus. He who was " the first-born of every 
creature," " the beginning of the creation of God," 
was incarnate, and " was made man," thus showing 
that " the finite is capable of the infinite,"and the in- 
finite of the finite, or that Divinity involves humanity. 
Yet this was a mediated process, begun in the 
kenosis, completed in the plerosis of Christ. " And 
Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favor 
with God and man " (St. Luke ii, 52). The grow- 
ing union of God and man begun at the nativity 
was only completed in the ascension and session at 
the right hand of God the Father. The whole 
mediation of his three-and-thirty years of life in 
organic relation with humanity in family and civil 
and religious relations and genealogy reaching back 
to " Adam which was the son of God " (St. Luke iii, 
38), was essential to his being made perfect man. 
He grew, increased in wisdom, confessed his ignorance 
of " that day and that hour " (St. Mark xiii, 32). His 
temptations, trials, sorrows, passion, and death were 
real and human, and only through them the comple- 



Classification of the Positive Religions, 261 

tion, or the excarnation, the return process occurs. 
There is no degradation, but the realization of genu- 
ine ethical divine-human love, in all this. The degra- 
dation would only have been if Jesus had stopped in 
any one of these stages of his ethical humiliation, if 
he had not passed through them all triumphantly, 
increased by means of them into the measure of per- 
fect man. 

Again, it is necessary to regard the incarnation as 
a process from the Godward side. His coming must 
be viewed as the fulfillment of a supernatural order, 
the consummation of the Divine, self-necessitated 
creation. Immanent Divine Love, a conception only 
possible with the Christian doctrines of God's triune 
nature, is the source and motive spring of all crea- 
tion, a creation which must go on till love returns 
home, and God be all in all. God so loved that he 
created the world, and "so loved the world that 
he must give his only-begotten Son." " God is 
love." " Now we see only in part," but we see the 
essential principle immanent in his creation, in the 
light of which we must try to spell out its working 
in the tangled mass of phenomena. 

This ideal truth of creation we seek, then, to read 
in the religious history of mankind, as its unbroken 
organic life and Logos. All admit this organic con- 
nection of the Christian with the Jewish religion. 

I How can we hesitate to extend the connection to all ? 
How can we decline the additional " aids to faith " 
and " evidences of Christianity " thus afforded by the 
scattered rays of the light which is always self-im- 

| parting love ? Nay, how can we, without heresy 
against both the gospel and thought, seek to exalt 
Christianity, which is not envious, by depressing all 



262 Philosophy of Religion. 

dimmer perception of the light ? The solidarity of 
man in sin and salvation is a chief topic in St. Paul's 
preaching of the gospel to Jew and Gentile. The 
essential Christ, the new Adam, is throughout human 
history to be seen beneath the debased image of God 
in the first Adam. This was the conception of Chris- 
tianity of the Greek fathers. Justin Martyr says: 
" We are taught that Christ is the first-born of God, 
and we have shown above that he is the Word, of 
whom the whole human race are partakers. And 
those who lived according to Reason are Christians, 
even though accounted atheists, such as, among the 

Greeks, Socrates and Heraclitus, and those who re- 

■ 

sembled them, and of the barbarians (Jews) Abraham, 
Ananias and Azarias, Misael and Elias, and many 
others ; from going through the list of whose names 
and actions, knowing that it would be tedious, I now 
beg to be excused." * 

We are familiar with Clement's view of the Logos 
as the universal Divine pedagogue in the cosmopoli- 
tan school of all nations. One quotation out of many 
specially significant ones must be given : " In the 
whole universe all the parts, though differing from 
one another, preserve their relation to the whole. So, 
then, the barbarian (Jewish) and Hellenic Philosophy 
have torn off a fragment of eternal truth from the 
theology of the ever-living Word {Logos). And he 
who brings together again the separate fragments 
and makes them one, will, without peril, contemplate 
the perfect Word, the truth." f 

As immanent Deity, constitutionally and organic- 
ally related to humanity, the Logos was, to a certain 
extent, universally incarnate or immundate, " the 

* Apology, i, chap. xlvi. f Stromata, vol. i, chap. xiii. 



Classification of the Positive Religions, 263 

Lamb slain from the foundation of the world." Jesus 
is the Christ, the absolute man, the perfect union of 
God and man, who comprises the prius and posterius 
of all history in himself in an absolute and unique 
manner. The incarnation is meaningless, and would 
have been impossible, without this organic relation 
to the religious consciousness and experience of man 
both before and after. Yet after and before there 
are elements of unwisdom, unrighteousness, and in- 
humanity connected with this work of the essential 
Christ. Only in him, the man Christ Jesus, was 
perfection realized. We demur to associating Chris- 
tianity with the debasing superstitions of false re- 
ligions. If the Christ were such a puritan, he might 
demur to associating his name with many phases of 
historical Christianity. Principal Caird has well 
said, as to this aversion to the idea of the organic 
connection of Christianity with previous religions : 
" The real ground for humiliation is not in the fetich- 
ism out of which religion is said to have sprung, or in 
the childish supersititions and irrational observances 
that have been the accidents of its history ; but rather 
in the element of fetichism and unreason that often 
still clings to it, in the admixture of magic which still 
deforms its worship, and the remains of meaningless 
and irrational dogma which still corrupt its faith." * 

Jesus Christ was the perfect realization of the re- 
ligious idea. But after, as well as before him, I 
have said, we have not the perfect realization of re- 
ligion. And yet we do not read Church history as 
profane. We call the Catholic Church holy. We 
believe in God in history, and in the Divine guid- 
ance of the Holy Spirit. We decline any puritanical 

* Philosophy of Religion, p. 344. 
24 



264 Philosophy of Religion. 

conception of Christianity as heretical and schismati- 
cal, because it denies this. Both the evangelical and 
the Anglo-Catholic reversion to earlier forms are equal- 
ly uncatholic, only different phases of the same denial 
of the guidance of the Holy Spirit and of the pres- 
ence of the Logos in all subsequent universal history. 
But all such work betrays the utmost artlessness 
of unhistorical and unphilosophical comprehension. 
True Catholicism receives, digests, and transmutes 
into present belief, all that which has" been believed 
" everywhere, always, and by all," in a far wider and 
truer sense than Vincent of Lerinus meant. The 
kingdom of heaven — the ideal society of Jesus — was 
likened by its divine Founder himself " to a seed that 
a man should cast into the ground, which groweth up 
he knoweth not how, because the earth bringeth forth 
fruit of herself." He who made the seed made also 
the fertile earth into which he casts it, so that the 
seed can not retain its primitive, undeveloped form, 
but must spring up and take nutriment and form 
from earth and air, first as the blade, then as the ear, 
and after that as the full corn in the ear. So Chris- 
tianity is the result of the incarnate Logos and the 
earth of secular life into which it was cast. The two 
can not be separated. They have been divinely 
given as elements of an organic process. Pagan and 
Jewish conceptions of the kingdom and its Divine 
service, Greek philosophic conception of its intel- 
lectual content, Roman conception of its law and 
order and manifold other human institutions and 
conceptions, were the earth prepared to receive this 
seed. Christian history has been the history of this 
growth of the original implicit force of the seed in 
its earth and air energizing and modifying environ- 



Classification of the Positive Religions. 265 

ments, the history of the Church, or of the gospel in 
secular life. Each generation takes up the past, but, 
instead of receiving it mechanically, it transmutes it 
into the fuller corn of the ear. This is the logic of 
Christian history, the infinite cunning of Reason that 
develops.we know not how, through apparently most 
uncongenial environments. All the conceptions of 
God, of the Christian religion and Church, diverse 
and discordant as they are, must be elements, assimi- 
lated not mechanical, of our truest conceptions to-day. 
The history of Christianity is not intelligible apart 
from a divine government of its necessarily organ- 
ized form of secular life — the Church. Its immanent 
logic is the ruling Logos that is a vital, self-realizing 
principle, that assumes and then transcends increas- 
ingly adequate expressions of its own life. This is 
the dogma of the guidance of the Church by the 
Holy Spirit. The instrumentality of Greek philoso- 
phy in introducing or formulating the Nicene sym- 
bol is no sufficient ground for asserting that it is for- 
eign to Christianity. No more are the influence of 
Jewish or pagan conceptions of religion and the Ro- 
man conception of organized law and authority suffi- 
1 cient grounds for asserting that the ecclesiastical and 
I sacramental development of Christianity, to which 
! they so largely contributed, are utterly foreign to the 
spirit of the gospel. All these are but the prepared 
j ground through which the Spirit manifests increas- 
ingly the full concrete logic of the divine life on 
earth. Christianity was never intended to be ab- 
stract, all in the air, remote from the secular sphere 
of life. But in the historic life of its Founder and in 
the historic life of the Spirit, which is a quasi-secular 
incarnation in the Church, it appears as the most 



266 Philosophy of Religion, 

concrete manifold life of which men can conceive. 
And puritanical criticism, of whatever type, is of 
such a one-sided, abstract character that it can not 
be accepted. We no longer conceive of or argue 
about the soul as an abstract unity. We know soul 
as the unity of body and spirit. So we know Chris- 
tianity as its Founder meant us to know it, as the 
union of the Logos and secular life — never yet, indeed, 
perfect in its manifestations, but moving toward the 
most full concrete life of which humanity is capable. 
. The true continuity of Christian thought is wider and 
deeper than that of either Greek or Latin conception. 
The nineteenth century conceptions of God, Christian- 
ity, and the Church are only catholic and in the line 
of the logic of history as they receive and transmute 
all previous partial conceptions, and thus, as heir of all 
the ages, gain the richer and fuller life of the Spirit. 

This is the true way of reading Church history, 
to read the sacred immanent in the secular, to see 
the leaven leavening the whole lump, to see the 
progressive reincarnation of the perfect man in the 
whole of his redeemed humanity. Christianity is a 
life, permeating and inspiring the good in the whole 
range of the secular life ; and yet all is not good, 
and all good is not equally good. We rejoice to see 
Christ preached in any and all ways, and to recog- 
nize his presence and power in all the truly human 
secular institutions and pursuits, as well as in that 
form of his kingdom organized for specific religious 
services, the Church — the most divine, as far as it 
is the most genuinely human secular institution.* 

* Cf. Canon Freemantle's Bampton Lecture, 1883, p. 299, and Mul- 
ford's Republic of God, p. 169. 



Classification of the Positive Religions. 267 

This has been the way of the Spirit, and the 
method of the Logos in history after his incarnation 
and excarnation. We decline to profane the history 
of his kingdom come, need we, dare we ungenerously 
profane the history of his kingdom coming? The 
world was made by him, and he was in the world, 
preparing, educating humanity, Gentiles and Jews, 
for his advent in visible incarnate form. That view 
which represents the preparation of the world for 
his advent to have been merely negative, all the 
seeking after God to have been in vain, is certainly 
an unchristian and untheistic view, denying the love 
of God, seeking after and going out to meet his re- 
turning prodigals ; denying his education of the world 
to have had any results, and evaporating all mean- 
ing in the expression " in the dispensation of the full- 
ness of times." The Scribes and Pharisees murmured 
at him for holding communion, eating and drinking 
with publicans and sinners. The irony of his reply 
should enter our souls, when we shrink from ac- 
knowledging his adumbrated presence in all pre- 
Christian religions : " They that be whole need not a 
physician. . . . Go ye and learn what that meaneth, 
I will have mercy and not sacrifice." And when we 
seek to exalt Christianity by our righteous deprecia- 
tion of other religions, we surely will hear his words 
to other Scribes and Pharisees : " He that is without 
sin among you, let him first cast a stone at them." 
The marvel and the mystery to us is, not that we find 
so much good in them, so great results of the divine 
education, but that we find so little. But, little as it 
is, we ascribe it to the one essential, persistent, or- 
ganic light and life of men. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

THE ABSOLUTE RELIGION. 






In Part III Hegel gives first the metaphysics of 
the Absolute Religion, and secondly the speculative 
view of Christianity as the revealed, positive, or his- 
torical form of this perfect religion. I present the 
larger part of it chiefly as a translation of the text. 
The first eight pages is a full translation. This may 
only serve with some to show how useless a literal 
translation of Hegel is, how much it needs to be re- 
translated in the form of expository and critical para- 
phrase. With others, it will lead to an appreciation 
of the severely scientific procedure of Hegel's thought 
and to a study of the original. I may add that Mr. 
Louis F. Soldan gives an excellent literal translation 
of this part* 

We have now reached the perfect religion, that in which 
the idea of religion has been fully realized. We have pre- 
viously denned religion as God's Self-consciousness. This 
self-consciousness of God is to be distinguished from finite 
consciousness. God knows himself in a consciousness which 
is distinct from himself; but this differs from finite con- 
sciousness by being implicitly God's own consciousness. Fur- 
ther, it is also explicitly God's own consciousness, being con- 
scious of its own identity with God through its negation of 

* The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, vols, xv, xvi. 



The Absolute Religion. 269 

finiteness. God distinguishes himself from himself so as to 
be his own object, and yet remains absolutely identical with 
himself in this distinction. That is, God is Spirit. This 
constitutes the content of religion. This perfect idea is now 
realized. Consciousness knows this content, and knows 
itself as inextricably bound up with it. It is a phase of the 
process of the Idea of God himself. 

The finite consciousness knows God only so far as God 
knows himself in it. God as spirit recognizes himself in the 
spirit of his Church — that is, in the spirit of those who re- 
vere him. In this perfect religion we have the revelation of 
God. He is no longer an unknown Being afar off, for he 
has acquainted man with himself, and that not merely 
through external history but in his consciousness. This is 
the religion of the revelation of God, since he knows him- 
self in the finite spirit. He is absolutely manifest. Such 
is the present relation. We have seen in the positive (pre- 
Christian) religions how this cognition of God as free Spirit 
was still burdened with finite limitations. It was the work 
of the Spirit to overcome these limitations. We have seen 
in these pre-Christian religions how the misery and pain re- 
vealed the nugatory character of these limitations to con- 
sciousness, and thus formed the subjective preparation for 
the consciousness of Spirit as an absolutely free and there- 
fore Infinite Spirit. 

(A.) First, let us notice the general character of this 
sphere. 

The absolute religion is (1) manifest {pffenbare) religion. 
But religion is manifest only when it has become an object 
to itself according to its idea, free from finite objectivity. 
That is, religion according to its general idea, is conscious- 
ness of the absolute essence. But all consciousness distin- 
guishes. So we have here the two, consciousness and abso- 
lute essence ; and primarily these two are external to each 
other, and thus finite. And so consciousness cognizes ab- 
solute essence only as something finite and not what it is, in 



2 70 Philosophy of Religion. 

truth. God himself is consciousness, distinction of himself 
in himself. But as consciousness he gives himself as object, 
is himself his own double, and thus annuls all limitation. 

We, on the contrary, always have two things in our con- 
sciousness, which are related to each other as finite and ex- 
ternal. But if religion comprehends itself, then the content 
and the object of religion are themselves the totality. That 
is, it is consciousness related to its own essence, the cogni- 
tion of essence as itself, and not as another. Thus Spirit is 
the object of religion. In it there are no longer two — con- 
sciousness and its object — but one ; that is, religion which 
is filled with itself, which is revealed. The object is not 
another, but Spirit, self-knowing essence. Here for the first 
time Spirit becomes the object and content of religion, and 
spirit exists only for spirit. 

This is the abstract determination of this Idea (Idee), 
or religion is, in fact, the Idea* For the Idea in the philo- 
sophical sense is the idea which has itself for an object. It 
has determinate existence, reality, objectivity, which is no 
longer merely internal or subjective, but which has objecti- 
fied itself. But this self-objectification is at the same time 
a return into itself. So far as we call the idea the aim, it is 
the realized, the accomplished idea, and thus objective. 

The object which religion has for itself is its own exist- 
ence, the consciousness of its own essence. It is therein 
objectified. It now has real existence, whereas it was at 
first merely subjective idea. The absolute religion is the 
revealed religion, having itself for its content: 

This, too, is the perfect religion which has spirit for it- 
self, which has become objective in itself — that is, the Chris- 
tian religion. The universal and the individual spirit, the 
finite and infinite, are inseparably combined in it. Their 
absolute identity constitutes this religion and its content. 

* Note the distinction between idea (Begriff) and Idea (Idee), which 
signifies the Absolute Idea. 



The Absolute Religion. 271 

Instead of abstract substance, we have the concrete 
Absolute Subject, making itself known to finite spirit. Yet, 
this is but a phase (moment, a dynamic element) of uni- 
versal spirit, and thus the latter, even in this separation, 
returns into itself undivided. 

Ordinarily theology has for its aim the cognition of God 
as something purely objective, absolutely separate from the 
subjective consciousness, like the sun or any other external 
object. But the idea of the absolute religion, on the con- 
trary, has to do with religion itself, rather than with these ex- 
ternal elements. The unity of the representation which we 
call God, or the Absolute Subject, is the object-matter of 
absolute religion. 

Many to-day profess that the chief thing is to have relig- 
ious life, to be pious, thus making the object of little im- 
portance. In fact, they say that the object, God, can not 
be really known. The chief concern is our own subjective 
piety. But even this standpoint contains an important 
advance in recognizing the validity of its infinite element 
— the subjective consciousness of the individual. In fact, 
this cognition of the absolute worth of the individual may 
be said to be the great attainment of our day. Individual 
subjectivity is a very essential determination of religion. 
But it must be asked how this determination has come 
about. 

Upon this we may offer the following remarks : Religion, 
in the determination of consciousness, is so conditioned 
that her content flies ahead, and thus seemingly remains a 
foreign object. From the standpoint of consciousness, any 
and every content that religion may have, seem to be for- 
eign. Even when the content is accepted as revealed, it 
remains for us an external affair. Such a conception of 
religion, as something that can not be cognized, but only 
passively received by faith, leads also to the subjectivity of 
feeling, which is the end and result of the worship of God. 
Thus the standpoint of consciousness is not the only one. 



272 Philosophy of Religion. 

The worshiper sinks himself, with his whole heart and de- 
votion and will, in the object of his worship. In the height 
of his devotion he has annulled, or rather absorbed and 
realized into unity, the separation which exists at the stand- 
point of consciousness. 

But this annulment of separation may then be conceived 
as something foreign, as the divine grace or mercy to which 
a man can only passively submit. Against this separation 
is turned the determination that makes religion, or man's 
subjective feeling, the chief thing. His will is only God's 
will. In him these two are inseparate. In other words, 
then, the subject is throughout the whole matter the real 
and essential relation. Thus the subject, the individual, is 
raised to an essential element. Along with this comes the 
freedom of spirit, which it has so restored that there is no 
place where it does not find itself. The idea of the absolute 
religion implies the objectivity of religion, though the con- 
sciousness of this idea does not. In the form of this con- 
sciousness, where piety is held to be the main thing, and the 
object of religion of little knowledge or matter, there is a 
lack of content and objectivity. 

But it is the prerogative of truth that knowledge finds its 
absolute content in religion. At this standpoint, however, 
the content appears only in a stunted form. It is contin- 
gent, finite, and empirically limited. Hence a certain re- 
semblance to that of the age of the Roman Empire. The 
subject is indeed conceived as infinite, but as the abstract 
infinite, and hence limited and finite. Here freedom is only 
such as allows a world beyond to exist. It is a longing 
which denies the distinctions of consciousness, and thus 
rejects the most essential element of spirit, leaving nothing 
but spiritual subjectivity. 

Religion is the spirit's knowledge of itself as spirit ; this 
is not substantial but subjective knowledge. Subjective 
consciousness does not know this limitation of its knowl- 
edge. It finds this abstract infinite as involved in its feeling 



The Absolute Religion. 273 

of its own finiteness. It takes it as the absolute though 
abstract ground of its own finite actuality. It is rather a 
feeling of longing for the inexplicable beyond ( Yenseits). 

The absolute religion, on the other hand, contains this 
category of subjectivity, or of infinite form, which does not 
differ much from the category of substance. Here the in- 
finitely substantial subjectivity makes an object and content 
for itself. In this content the .finite subject is again dis- 
tinguished from the infinite object. God as Spirit, dwelling 
apart by himself, or not dwelling as a living spirit in his 
Church, is only looked upon as a one-sided limitation, as an 
external object. 

The absolute religion is the idea (BegrirT) or notion. It 
is the idea of the absolute Idea (Idee) in its perfect realiza- 
tion. Here we have spirit as the 'reality which exists for 
spirit, which has spirit for its object, and therefore this re- 
ligion is the revealed religion : God reveals himself. Reve- 
lation means this judgment of infinite form which can deter- 
mine itself and be for another. This self-manifestation 
belongs to the essence of spirit itself. A spirit that does 
not manifest itself is not spirit. 

We say, God has created the world. The act is looked 
upon as a completed act, which could not happen again, or 
as something that might or might not have happened. Thus 
we say that God might or might not have revealed himself. 
But all such predications are arbitrary and accidental, and 
do not belong to the idea of God. For God as spirit is 
essentially this self-revelation. He does not create the 
world only once. He is eternally creating, eternally reveal- 
ing himself, eternally working. This is the conception and 
the definition of God. 

Revealed religion which manifests spirit to spirit is thus 
the religion of spirit. It does not lock itself out from an- 
other which is only temporarily foreign to itself. God him- 
self creates the other and abrogates it by fulfilling it. It is 
the nature of spirit to be its own phenomenon. This is its 



274 Philosophy of Religion. 

very deed and life, to manifest itself to itself. What is it 
that reveals God, we may exclaim, if it be not his own self- 
revelation ? He reveals the infinite form. Absolute sub- 
jectivity is that which characterizes itself by the positing of 
distinctions, of content. He thus reveals his power to cre- 
ate these distinctions in himself. He gives and retakes. 
Thus it is revealed that he is for another. This is the 
characteristic of revelation. 

2. This religion which is manifest to itself is also called 
the revealed (geoffenbart) religion. This means, on the one 
hand, that it has been revealed by God to man, and on the 
other that it is revealed in the sense of being bestowed upon 
man by a power outside of himself. In this last sense it is 
also called positive religion. 

But what, we may ask, do we mean by this conception 
of positive ? 

Absolute religion is certainly positive in the sense that 
everything existing for consciousness is something externally 
objective to it. Everything must come to us in an external 
way. Thus the sensuous is positive ; and everything spir- 
itual comes to us in the same way as first finite or historical, 
and then as spiritual. All such external spirituality is positive. 

The laws of liberty as posited in social codes show us a 
higher and purer spirituality. Though this is of the nature 
of pure spirituality, it comes to us in the first place exter- 
nally as instruction, education, or doctrine. It is thus medi- 
ated and certified to us. The laws of society and of the 
state are also positive. They meet us, they are for us, they 
are valid. They have not merely such kind of existence 
that we can ignore them, but such as are subjectively essen- 
tial. They are the real laws of our true selves. 

When we comprehend and find it rational that crime 
should be punished, we can say that it is both valid and es- 
sential for us not only because it is positive law, but also 
because it has internal validity in our reason as something 
essential because rational. 






The Absolute Religion. 275 

Being positive does not make it irrational and unnatural. 
The laws of freedom have always a positive side ; they are 
manifested in external contingent reality. Laws must be 
limited ; and in placing limits to the quality and the quan- 
tity of penalty, we have this external element. 

The positive element can not be omitted in penal laws ; 
but in this there is something not rational. Thus, in pro- 
nouncing penalty, a round number is generally taken. Rea- 
son can not apportion the exactly just penalty. Whatever 
is purely and arbitrarily positive is irrational. To a certain 
extent it must be limited in a way that is not primarily ra- 
tional. 

This is also a necessary side of revealed religion. It 
comes in a historical or externally manifest way. This opens 
the way for the positive and contingent element — that is, it 
might be manifest in this or in that historical way. The 
merely external always admits the purely positive or con- 
tingent. 

But we may distinguish between the purely and the 
formally positive. The law of freedom may be formally 
positive; but it is more than this. It is really valid, not 
simply because it happens to prevail, but because it is the 
characteristic of our own rationality. Thus, too, religion 
has a positive element in its didactic side ; but it must not 
stop here with the merely positive and thus remain a mere 
matter of memory or of imagination. 

In regard to the verification of religion, its external posi- 
tive element must testify to the truth of the religion, must 
seem to be the ground of its truth. Sometimes this verifica- 
tion has the form of the purely positive. Such are miracles 
and witnesses when given as proof of the divinity of the one 
proclaiming these revelations and of his having taught such 
and such doctrines. 

Miracles are sensible changes in the sensuous world, per- 
ceived through the senses. Perception of them is itself sen- 
suous, and as such is their positive side. This side of them, 
25 



276 Philosophy of Religion. 

it is said, furnishes a verification for the sensuous man ; but 
this is only the beginning of a verification, an unspiritual 
verification, by means of which alone the spiritual can never 
be verified. 

But this side of miracles is not, Hegel asserts, to 
be over-emphasized. When it is, then the under- 
standing insists upon trying to explain them in some 
natural way, and so to really explain them away. 
But reason as such refuses the verification which the 
merely positive or external part of miracles offers. 
Spirit can only accept spiritual verification of spir- 
itual things. This is the doctrine of the testimony of 
the Spirit. Christ himself rejects miracles as a true 
criterion of truth. At the last day he will reject 
many who come saying that they have done many 
miracles in his name * (Matt, vi, 22). The evidence 
of the spirit may sometimes be very indefinite. In 
studying history we find our spirit strangely moved 
and won by what appears as noble, sublime, moral, 
and divine. But it may also take more definite and 
intellectual form, depending upon the activity, the 
insights, and the self-consistency of our thought. It 
may take the form of intellectual or of moral max- 
ims, forming the causal principles of our rational 
activity. 

There are many degrees of spiritual need and 
culture. But the highest need of the human mind is 
true thought, which transcends merely sympathetic, 
maximatical, and inferential evidence. This highest 
form of the testimony of the spirit is philosophy. 
Here the conception (idea), purely as such, develops 
the truth out of itself. And in this thinking develop- 
ment of the truth the spirit cognizes its necessity, 
and consistency. The necessary is the self-consistent, 



The Absolute Religion, 277 

and the self-consistent is the necessary. It is the 
absolutely rational, as contrasted with the vulgar 
rationalism of the understanding. But we can not 
expect all men to apprehend the truth in the philo- 
sophical or speculative way. As we have said, the 
testimony of the spirit is as manifold as the needs 
and culture of men. Thus we find many men in 
that stage of development that conviction comes to 
them from their confidence and belief in external 
authority. At this stage miracles have their worth, 
and Christ recognized it. Many believed on him for 
his miracles' sake. They awakened the conviction of 
sympathy. They touched the heart. But the heart 
and feeling of man are not the same as of the animal. 
It is always the heart of a thinking man. It is a 
thinking heart. And so religion of the heart can not 
be divorced from thinking. Christian doctrines may 
be stated in a very positive external way in the Bible. 
But when spirit gives its testimony for them, it is in 
man's innermost nature. They become harmonious 
with his spirit, his thinking, his reason. They Jind 
him, satisfy him, his spirit, and so are believed. As 
a thinking being, however, . he can not stop at this 
point, but must proceed to further thoughts and re- 
flections about them. This leads to theology or to 
the philosophical comprehension of the truths of re- 
ligion. And this is the highest form of the testimony 
of the Spirit. 

It is perfectly true that the Bible is itself sufficient 
for some men, and makes them very good and re- 
ligious. But they are not thinking Christians, not 
theologians. Mere quoting of Scripture does not 
make one a theologian, else were the devil one. In 
fact, very few Christians refrain from explaining and 



2 78 Philosophy of Religion. 

interpreting holy Scripture. And the main point is, 
whether interpretation, their reflective thought about 
it, is correct or not. 

It is of no avail to say that all their inferences 
and explanations are based upon the Bible ; that their 
theology is biblical theology. This is a favorite ex- 
pression with the school of Ritschl in Germany to- 
day, which professedly discards all speculative inter- 
pretation of Scripture, such as the doctrine of the 
holy Trinity, of the atonement, and of the person of 
Christ. For as soon as we make any formal and con- 
nected statement of Bible truths, we do so with cer- 
tain intellectual forms and mental presuppositions. 
Thus, the purest form of biblical theology gives us the 
contents of the Bible in the form and the mode of 
current thought. Thus, there is as much imposition 
as there is exposition in all such theology. But it 
is further to be noted that the very words of the 
Bible, as the utterance of the Spirit, are rational 
words, and connected in the form of thinking, not 
merely diverse and scattered leaves of a thought- 
less Sibyl. The biblical theologians of the middle 
ages found the utterance of the Spirit in the Bible 
to be in the thought relations of formal logic. The 
spirit spoke, according to Aristotle, and it might 
have spoken according to much less true form, 
as some biblical theologians to-day would fain have 
it do. 

There can be no theology without philosophy, 
and when it turns against philosophy it is either un- 
conscious that it uses it, or else it deceitfully chooses 
to use some arbitrary, accidental, antique, or modern 
form of thinking. But all such arbitrary thinking 
is to be disparaged. Pure, catholic, self-consistent 






The Absolute Religion. 279 

thought is to be demanded. This is only to be found 
in the purely speculative, in the self-explication of 
the Idea. The Bible is the utterance of the Idea. 
The Logos gives it form and meaning and life. The 
mere letter, or the letter interpreted by any acci- 
dental, arbitrary, or sectarian presuppositions, fancies, 
or philosophies, killeth. The spirit of man in receiv- 
ing the truths of the Bible, can not be passive and 
mechanical. It grasps and knows them by thought- 
activity, according to various concepts, categories, 
and principles. Some thus get more and some less, 
for some grasp with lower categories and concep- 
tions. But all must do some thinking in order to 
obtain anything — even those biblical theologians, 
who, in their exegetical activity, imagine that they 
are purely receptive. Unconsciously surrendering 
themselves to arbitrary and accidental presupposi- 
tions of finite thought, these theologians to-day deny 
the very fundamental doctrines of Christianity. The 
whole school of Ritschl thus deny the presence and 
the activity of the Holy Spirit in the work of the 
thought of catholic Christianity. What they deny 
now, it was the work of philosophy under Hegel to 
maintain and preserve. 

In considering Christianity Hegel proposes to 
begin in the opposite way. Instead of beginning 
with the external and historical, he sets out from 
the idea (Begriff) of Christianity. This historical 
study he presupposes as a necessary requisite to 
his present work, and he no more undervalues it 
than the most humble and simple-minded disciple 
of Christ. He does not propose to evolve Chris- 
tianity out of nothing but his own subjective con- 
sciousness. For him it is revelation done in history, 



280 Philosophy of Religion. 

and wrought into the hearts and minds of men 
through the external media of Bible, Church, and 
sacraments. 

But, presupposing all this, he proposes to examine 
and to comprehend the thought-process, the logic, 
the idea thus revealed and received. It is a study 
of the forms of this thought-activity in receiving 
Christianity. Consciousness is directed toward the 
course of the categories or concepts in such activity, 
toward such thinking as has verified and known itself 
through a discrimination between essential and ac- 
cidental, between finite and rational categories of 
thought. 

3. Thus absolute religion is the religion of truth and 
freedom. The spirit is for spirit, and is, therefore, its own 
presupposition. We begin with the spirit as subject, which 
is the eternal intuition of itself, and is, therefore, compre- 
hended only as a result or end. This capacity of being 
both subject and object is the truth of real spirit; and 
this is also the idea and the absolute Idea of spirit. It is 
truth. Absolute religion is also that of freedom. Abstractly, 
freedom is the relation to something external that is not 
strange or hostile It conciliates this external object, recog- 
nizing it as an element of its true self. Such reconciliation 
is freedom, as that of God in Christ reconciling the world 
unto himself (2 Cor. v, 19). But each one of these (recon- 
ciliation, truth, and freedom), being an activity, is a general 
process, and can not, therefore, be expressed in a single 
proposition without being one-sided and therefore untrue. 
The chief conception is that of the unity of the divine and 
human nature. God has become man. This unity is, in 
the first place, only implicit or potential. But it is also 
eternally being actualized. This progressive free reconcili- 
ation only takes place because of the inherent potential 
unity of the divine and human. This unity has sometimes 









The Absolute Religion. 281 



been conceived as an abstract identity — e. g., as the sub- 
stance of Spinoza. But with us the unity is that of sub- 
jectivity or Spirit which eternally actualizes itself, makes 
man in his own image and freely reconciles the estranged 
world to himself. 

This conception of God, the absolute Idea (Idee), as the 
absolute truth, is the result of all philosophy. It is both 
the real logic of thought, and also the logic observed in the 
concrete world. We can better express it by saying that 
in the absolute Idea, or the philosophic conception of God, 
we behold nature and life and spirit as organic members. 
Each one is, as it were, a mirror reflecting this Idea, so that 
it appears therein as particularized or as a process, thus 
manifesting its unity in difference. 

In nature religions God is conceived of as some alien 
natural object. The absolute religion contains this stand- 
point, but only as a transitory element. In the second 
form of religion, styled the religion of spiritual individu- 
ality (that of the Jews, the Greeks, and Romans), spirit 
also remains limited finitely. Consciousness has become 
self-consciousness. But its object is conceived as absolute 
power. The one, the limiting one, is only abstract power, 
which is not yet recognized as akin to the worshiper. (In 
the words of a modern writer, who occupied the same 
standpoint, it is " the power in us, not ourselves, that makes 
for righteousness.") 

But the power and its necessity are conceived in an 
abstract way, and hence the degeneracy into finite forms of 
many gods. It is only in the third and final form that we 
have that religion of freedom and self-consciousness which 
is at the same time conscious of the concrete reality of 
God, as not merely above, beyond, outside, almighty, and 
arbitrary, but as the Father of all spirits. With such self- 
consciousness, abstract necessity gives place to concrete 
freedom. Spirit is everywhere at home. "Not my will, 
but thy will be done," becomes the glad aspiration of every 



282 Philosophy of Religion, 

spirit who has grasped this conception of God. That will 
is none other than the law of the perfect life for man, and 
not the arbitrary imposition by an almighty task-master of 
laws out of all genial relation to the nature of man. 

(£.) The metaphysical idea, or concept of the Idea 
of God. 

By the metaphysical idea of God, Hegel means 
the absolute Idea which realizes itself from within — 
that is, Spirit. But this implies the unity of concept 
and reality, of thought and being. This is really the 
ontological proof, so called, of the existence of God. 
In this section Hegel discusses the validity of it as 
given by Anselm, and also the non-validity of Kant's 
famous criticism of it. But his examination of this 
argument is so abstruse, that, in place of reproducing 
it, I shall attempt to give the main points at issue 
in the discussion of this proof to-day, in the spirit of 
Hegel. 

He does not for a moment allow that there can 
be any formal demonstration of the existence of God. 
With him this is everywhere itself the principle of 
the demonstration of every kind of existence. Form- 
al logic may logomacize and cheat itself into the be- 
lief that it has performed the demonstration, while 
really its truth is assumed in the very terms of the 
demonstration. The existence of God is the neces- 
sary precedent and postulate of all human thought 
of God. It is the primal truth, the Logos of all truth. 
Induction from the external world and deduction 
from finite psychological notions are equally futile 
in trying to reach at the end of syllogisms that 
which is really the life of all syllogisms. Hegel, 
however, recognizes the difficulty of grasping the 
profound truth involved in this argument when it 






The Absolute Religion. 283 

is attempted by the mere understanding, the faculty 
of the finite. At this standpoint we have the idea or 
conception of God, and then we have the conception 
of being as different from and in no vital relation 
with it. The problem, then, is to effect a union be- 
tween them, to mediate some way between the two, 
so that the thought of God shall develop itself into 
existence. 

The understanding takes hold of the problem 
thus : The thought of God is made the starting-point. 
Then this is defined as including the whole of reality. 
Then being or existence is affirmed to be a reality ; 
whence follows the conclusion that being belongs to 
the thought of God, the total of reality. The thought 
or conception that we have in our minds of the most 
perfect or the most real Being, ens realissimum, must 
have the attribute of existence, else we can conceive 
of a more perfect being, which is contrary to our defi- 
nition. The conclusion is from thought — that is, from 
our subjective conception of God to his actual exist- 
ence. It is no wonder that the understanding has 
barely framed this syllogism before it proceeds to de- 
molish it. Kant's refutation of this form of it is clas- 
sically final. He affirms that from our notion or 
thought of God his existence can never be inferred. 
For existence is one thing, and our conception an- 
other. Anybody can build castles in the air, but no 
logic can give them actual existence. Anybody can 
imagine a hundred dollars in his pocket, but by no 
sophistry can he from this notion get a hundred 
actual dollars in his pocket. Any merchant may 
add numberless naughts to his cash accounts with- 
out being able to thereby increase his wealth. 
These last two illustrations are the famous ones of 



284 Philosophy of Religion. 

Kant.* Hegel remarks that the unexampled favor 
and acceptance which attended Kant's criticism of 
this proof was undoubtedly due to the illustration he 
made use of. But the illustration seems perfectly 
valid against this argument when forced into the 
syllogism of the understanding. 

From the conception of the most perfect Being, 
logic can deduce the conception of his actual existence, 
but it can not deduce the objective reality. From 
the conception of the most wealthy man, logic can 
deduce the conception of thousands of dollars in his 
purse, but can never deduce an actually existing rich 
man with these actual dollars in his pocket. Nothing 
can be more obvious than that actual existence can not 
be deduced from the conception of existence. " And 
nothing," says Hegel, " can be pettier in knowledge 
than this." But can it even be imagined that such pro- 
found thinkers as Augustine and Anselm should have 
framed an argument so easy of refutation ? The fool 
who in his heart disbelieves in God could not more 
satirically make mock proof of his existence than by 
such a form. These men were fools neither in heart 
nor in head. 

Hegel also criticises Kant for applying the term 
idea to things like a hundred dollars, saying that this 
" may not unfairly be styled a barbarism of language." 
Indeed, it is claimed by Anselm, as well as Hegel, 
that the thought or idea of God is unique, unlike any 
merely subjective conception. This idea of God 
involves his existence. It is the unity of thought and 
existence that constitutes the idea of God. Anselm's 

* Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, Meiklejohn's translation, pp. 368- 
370. 



The Absolute Religion. 285 

statement of the argument asserts this. It begins by 
asserting that God is the most perfect Being, who 
can not be conceived not to exist, though everything 
else besides can be conceived not to exist.* God is, 
he says. No proof is offered by him of God's exist- 
ence. It is asserted, as that of which it is impossible 
for Reason not to conceive. God is, and is the most 
perfect Being, and therefore he is more than a mere 
idea or thought. " God transcends all conception/' 
continues Anselm, and therefore he can not be a 
mere conception in the intellect of man. " God is 
before all things, and beyond all things," he con- 
tinues. How much greater, therefore, than any mere 
notion of him in the head of man ! " God is the only 
necessary Being, he is the whole, the absolute, the only 
God," continues Anselm. How different all this is 
from the argument of straw that Kant so triumph- 
antly demolishes ! He accepts the catholic faith of 
all the wise and good of all time instead of evolving 
a mere subjective conception from his own head. 

God is. Even the fool presupposes him, in the 
very act of setting forth the denial of him. But he 
is, therefore, more than any mere conception of him. 
Anselm is only arguing for the highest possible con- 
ception of God, which is that he is not merely a 
product of the human mind, or the conclusion of a 
formal syllogism. There is no question of deducing 
his Being from man's idea of him. The presupposi- 
tion is always that of the unity of the idea and the 
existence of God. It is the unity of the idea and 
being that constitutes the catholic conception of 



* Anselm's Proslogium, translation in the Bib. Sacra, vol. viii, and 
Journal of Speculative Philosophy, vol. xv. 



286 Philosophy of Religion. 

God. This, however, must not be taken as maintain- 
ing that God's existence is exactly identical with your 
or my conception of him. For Anselm argues that 
God is greater than all (human) conception or idea 
of him. It is the idea or thought, which is before, 
beyond, in and constitutive of the thought of all 
thinkers and all objects of thought. It is the idea of 
the absolute self-conscious intelligence, upon which 
our whole conscious life is based, without which no 
thought, no thinker, and no object of thought, would 
exist. 

Such is the thought of Anselm and others on 
this argument. We may add that nothing could be 
further from this great thought than the attempt to 
prove God to have such external, objective, spatial 
existence as a tree, a house, or a man. Such a poor 
anthropomorphic and deistic conception of God has 
scarcely any kinship with the idea of God we have 
been considering. We may only too gladly yield to 
its critics that it does not imply God's existence as 
one among other finite existences. In asserting his 
existence, as implied in his idea, we are not taking 
for our measure the conception of existence in the 
sense of empirical reality, but in the sense of thought, 
the most real of all reality, extra-temporal and extra- 
spatial, and yet creative of time and space, immanent 
in these conditions under which we think in a limited 
way. It is not the idea of God dwelling remotely 
in the same space conditions, and only making occa- 
sional visitations to other parts of space to create and 
reveal. But, if he did not create in time and space, 
he did create with them, and since then reveals him- 
self under these self-imposed conditions of ethical 
love. It is this divine immanence that enables us to 



The Absolute Religion. 287 

reach the idea of him, and guarantees a relative iden- 
tity even between our thought and real being. The 
very nature of everything finite is an inequality 
between its idea and its actual existence in time and 
space. The same is true of all finite, subjective con- 
ceptions. It is a senseless distortion to say that phi- 
losophy affirms their identity with being. 

Das Wissen ist Geist. It is not absolute, and yet it 
is not wholly false. Painful toil and gradual process 
mark the advance of our thought to more adequate 
reality. The implicit faith of all activity of our 
thought is that there is a common ground between 
the 6v of the external world and our X0709. This is 
the source of all confidence and work, and even of 
our sanity. Science could not and would not move 
a step without this presupposition. Philosophy in- 
terprets the basis of this faith into that Ontology which 
makes this common ground to be Infinite Spirit that 
is the real and absolute unity of Thought and Being. 
Sense conditioned, we go beyond sense, because both 
ourselves and sensuous nature are grounded in the su- 
persensuous, the metaphysical, the immanent Divine. 

God is the metaphysics (jierd, in the midst of) of 
man and nature. The agreement between ideal 
(rational) laws of thought and the real laws or con- 
tent of existence is a fact of experience. And the 
only way to account for this agreement is the pre- 
supposition of a common ground of both, in which 
thought and being not only agree but are identical. 
This thought is the real ground of the external world 
and of our thought. That our finite thought can 
know reality partially, see it through however opaque 
a glass you please, is explicable only by this thought. 
This is the real meaning and the vitally practical 
26 



288 Philosophy of Religion. 

significance of the ontological argument. It is only 
the scientific statement of the faith or reason of 
humanity. Underneath us and the world are the 
everlasting arms. We live and move and have our 
being, mental and moral, as well as physical, in him, 
and He lives and moves and has real being in us. 
This external self-conscious Idea involved with all 
existence, is the ground of its own progressive re- 
production into higher likeness, in human thought. 
God is all that the human spirit is capable of becom- 
ing, through aeons of learning under the Divine Peda- 
gogue. He is the ethical cause of our God-conscious- 
ness, by which we perceive his " eternal power and 
Godhead " in the universe, and rise to higher and 
purer conceptions, as he speaks to us " fragmentarily 
and multifariously." 

" In thy light we shall see light " is philosophy's 
confession, as well as that of religion. " This argu- 
ment is one latent in every unsohisticated mind, 
and it recurs in every philosophy, even against its 
wish and without its knowledge — as may be seen 
in the theory of immediate faith." * 

(C.) Hegel makes the following division of the 
whole topic of the Absolute religion : " The absolute 
eternal Idea (Idee) is— 

" i. God in and for himself in his eternity before 
the creation of the world and outside of the world. 

"2. Creation of the world. This created world 
divides itself into the two sides of physical nature 
and of finite spirit. This is primarily posited as 
alien and external to God. But it belongs to the 
very essence of God that he reconcile this to himself. 

* Hegel's Logic, p. 287. 



The Absolute Religion. 289 

The Idea, having dirempted itself, must lead back this 
separated element to itself as its truth. 

" 3. This process of reconciliation is the work of 
the Holy Spirit in his Church." 

" These are not external divisions that we make, 
but the course of the activity, of the developed life 
of the Absolute Spirit itself. This is its eternal life, 
its divine history, which we must consider in each 
of the three forms." 

In regard to place or space we may say that the 
first is divine history outside of the world, spaceless ; 
the second is in the world, or God in perfect, definite 
existence ; the third is within, in the Church, which 
is at first in the world, but elevating itself to heaven, 
having heaven already in itself — that is, full of active 
good-will. 

The same distinction may also be applied to this 
divine history in regard to time. It is timeless, and 
then passes through the time relations of past, pres- 
ent, and future, into the eternal now. " Throughout 
the whole it is the Idea of God as divine self-revelation y 
that we have to consider." 

Man can not demonstrate the Being of God, but 
God can and does from his essential nature reveal 
himself to man. First, he reveals himself as being 
perfect in and by himself, as pure spirit, thought, 
reality. This is the realm of the Father. Secondly, 
he reveals himself as the Son in the world, under the 
conditions of empirical history. But through this 
historical form the spirit in man sees the divine his- 
tory, the manifestation of God himself. This forms 
the transition to the realm of the Spirit, in which the 
process of reconciliation is embodied in the form of 
worship. 



290 Philosophy of Religion. 

" We must, moreover, distinguish throughout how 
the Idea is in these three forms for the idea, or per- 
fect comprehension, and how it appears in our men- 
tal representations of it, in our picture-thought, or 
image conception. For religion is universal. The 
idea of God is not only manifest to the man of cult- 
ured scientific thought, for philosophers, but also to 
those who know only in the more popular, unsci- 
entific form of imaginative conceptions. It has, in- 
deed, necessary characteristics which are inseparable 
from this form of knowledge." 

The preceding pages of this chapter are chiefly a 
translation, without attempt at exposition, of Hegel's 
Introduction to Part III* with the exception of the 
paragraphs on the ontological proof. It is scarcely 
just to give this without accompanying exposition. 
It is scarcely just to stop with this abstract intro- 
duction : to the most interesting part of the whole work, 
consisting of — 1. The Construction of the Chris- 
tian Doctrine of the Holy Trinity. 2. The Doctrine 
of the Person and Work of Christ. 3. The Realm of 
the Holy Spirit, or the Formation, Function, and Au- 
thority of the Church. I shall, therefore, conclude 
with a very brief resume oi this Part, which, however, 
is worthy of large amplification and illustration. 

Absolute Spirit, as identical with all real being, 
is both the goal and the origin of all thought. As 
Spirit, God is self-conscious. Self - consciousness is 
not simple but complex. Subject, object, and sub- 
ject-object are essential and distinguished elements 
in all consciousness. God is Actus Purus. But pure 
activity has its phases or moments. Before all time 

* Pp. 191-223. 



The Absolute Religion. 291 

God in and for himself eternally begets his only-be- 
gotten Son, and recognizes himself in his Son, as 
the Son does himself in the Father. This reciprocal 
relation of identity in difference is the Spirit. " The 
Holy Spirit is eternal love. Love is a distinction of 
two, who yet are not distinguished for each other. 
This perceiving, this feeling, this cognizing of unity 
is love." * 

The Trinity is a mystery and a contradiction 
when the mere understanding looks at it. It comes 
up with its categories of finitude, counts one, two, 
three, and says they can not possibly be but one. 
Two persons can not be one person. But the doc- 
trine of the Trinity is that this threefold Person is 
but One, each person being posited as an organic 
moment or element of the One Absolute Personality. 
The abstract personality of each of these moments 
must not be retained in their separation, else we have 
Tritheism. The whole is an eternal, immanent pro- 
cess, " a play of self-sustenance, the assurance of self- 
existence.'' Very rude forms of this conception are 
found in Oriental religions. Also in Greek philoso- 
phy, especially that of Alexandria, we find forms in 
which this idea has fermented. 

The conception of the creation of the world is 
essentially related to the Triune conception of God. 
Creation is a free movement, an immanent distinc- 
tion in the Idea, and not an act done once for all. It 
is the self-posited " other " of God, the principle of 
antithesis of self - objectivity in God. Hegel sub- 
sumes under this category or moment of the Divine 
self-activity (a) nature, (b) man, and (c) Christ. From 

* Vol. ii, p. 227. 



292 Philosophy of Religion, 

the Divine standpoint the whole process is an inter- 
play of love, an activity of self-conscious life. From 
the human standpoint, this activity in the temporal 
sphere shows " all the seriousness and pain and labor 
and patience of the difference," struggling back after 
reunion with its source. From this standpoint the 
full emphasis is placed upon the element of differ- 
ence. This includes the creation, the whole groan- 
ing and travailing of the creation in sin and misery, 
redemption, and reconciliation of the world to God. 
It includes the whole process which pertains to the 
incarnation, as the summit of creation, and its result- 
ing church militant merging into the church tri- 
umphant, when the Son " shall have delivered up 
the kingdom to God . . . and also himself be subject 
unto him who did put all things under him, that God 
may be all in all," and the emphasis be placed upon 
the restored unity — the love of the whole process. 

Hegel's profound conception of sin and redemp- 
tion is barely hinted at in such brief re'sutne' of his 
pregnant sentences. 

As related to God, man is bad by nature, and 
must be born again. As related to nature and his 
environment he is unhappy, and needs the reconcili- 
ation which can only come with restored son-ship. 
He must become fully conscious of both his sin and 
his misery before the atonement can be mediated by 
the incarnation. Consciousness of this is also fol- 
lowed by consciousness of total inability to regain 
his lost estate. Mere morality and civilization are 
inadequate to the task of healing the breach. " This 
is the profoundest depth " (die tiefste Tiefe).* 

* Vol. ii, p. 270. 



The Absolute Religion. 293 

Evil, as embracing sin and misery, is the inade- 
quacy of man to his ideal, and his inability to reach 
his ideal by his own efforts. This drove men to seek 
help from inadequate gods, and then again to self- 
help in philosophy. All this result of the co-working 
of God with the human spirit was attained in his 
schooling of the race until "the fullness of times." 
The Roman Empire at the advent is analogous to 
a place of birth, and its pain is like the travail throes 
of another and higher spirit. The need was felt, 
and " the desire of nations " came in form adequate 
to the need, as he had ever been coming unto and 
seeking men according to their receptive capacity, 
thus schooling them for the ultimate perfect revela- 
tion of reconciling love in the incarnation. The hith- 
erto co-working of God with man came to birth- 
throes in the incarnation, " the axis on which the his- 
tory of the world turns. It is the goal, and at the 
same time the true starting-point of history.* 

Hegel affirms in the strongest terms not only the 
necessity of the incarnation, but the necessity of its 
taking place once for all in one special man. It can 
occur but once, and is absolutely unique, thus differ- 
ing from the Oriental conception of Avatars. 

Christ was not merely a great man, or a great 
moralist, but absolutely the incarnate Son of God, 
beyond all human categories. Even the conception 
of him as the one sinless man is inadequate.f The 
God-man is the only proper definition, as given by 
the Church. To the mere understanding this is 
as monstrous and contradictory a combination as 

* Philosophy of History, p. 331. 

f Vol. ii, pp. 283-287, and Philosophy of History, p 337. 



294 Philosophy of Religion. 

that of the sphinx. If we make absolute and endless 
distinction between divine and human spirit, this 
term is monstrous. But "Christ calls himself the 
Son of God and the Son of man. This must be taken 
literally," * as it can be only when we do not posit 
absolute incongruity and non-kinship of the nature 
of man with that of God. Miracles may lead the 
way to the recognition of Jesus as the Son of God, 
but they are relative and subordinate evidence to 
that of the witness of one's own spirit. Son of Di- 
vine love, he manifested this love to his fellow-men. 
This love begets answering love. Disciples and 
crowds of needy ones gather about him. " God was 
in Christ reconciling the world unto himself." 

But the reconciliation is yet to be worked out in 
men and humanity. On the God ward side " it is 
finished " once for all. " Thou hast put all things in 
subjection under his feet." On the manward side 
" we see not yet all things put under him (i. e., man). 
But we see Jesus crowned with glory and honor " 
(Hebrews ii, 8, 9). This accomplished reconciliation 
is the basis of the Christian community. But it is 
known or fully realized only after the outpouring 
of the Holy Spirit. Not till then could his disci- 
ples read his earthly life and passion aright. He 
was made man. Humanity is his kin. His death 
shows " that he was god-man, the God who had hu- 
man nature, even unto death.f " With his death be- 
gins the return movement ; for God maintains and 
preserves himself in this process, and Christ's death 
is only the death of death. He arises again to life 
and ascends to the right hand of God, thus showing, 

* Vol. ii, p. 294. f Ibid., p. 298. 



The Absolute Religion, 295 

in most marked way, the dignity and worth and the 
identity of human nature with the Divine nature." * 
With his ascension comes the outpouring of the Spirit 
— not till then could his disciples " see Jesus crowned 
with glory and honor," as the pledge that they also 
should be crowned with glory and honor. Not till 
then could they read the divine in the human life of 
Christ and apprehend the mighty power of his love. 
It was expedient that he go away out of sensuous 
form, that the Spirit might make his abode in the 
midst of them to the end of the world. " The Holy 
Ghost was poured out over the disciples and became 
their immanent life. From that moment they went 
forth joyfully as a church into the world, in order to 
elevate it to a universal church." f " The Church is 
a real, present life in the spirit of Christ." 

Hegel's view of the authority of the Church is the 
modern one of the dignity, worth, and adequacy of 
the utterances of the religious consciousness of the 
ethical aristocracy of the community, as opposed to 
subjective, capricious, and very unbalanced views of 
individuals. His whole view of the moral (sittlicke), 
as embodied in the customs and laws of the ethical 
institutions of family, state, and church, is militant 
against extreme individualism. A man has no right 
to make a brand-new conscience for himself. He is 
bound to enlighten and educate it by the cultured 
conscience of the community, and thus be able to 
take his part in the frequent reformations and 
enlargement of this communal conscience. Thus 
Catholicism, without the constantly purifying and 
progressive Protestant principle, is sectarian ; and 

* Vol. ii, p. 300 and foot-note. f Ibid., p. 316. 



296 Philosophy of Religion. 

Protestantism, without its organic relation with the 
Catholic past, is also sectarian. 

The Christian consciousness is being gradually 
guided and educated into all truth by the immanent 
Holy Spirit. " It is important that the Christian 
religion be not limited to the literal words of Christ 
himself. It is in the apostles that the completed and 
developed truth is first exhibited. This complex of 
thought unfolded itself in the Christian community 
in the midst- of the elements of the environing Roman 
Empire." * The leaven working in the whole lump 
and its environments exegetes its own content as the 
Faith. " It is clear that the community produces this 
Faith. It is not merely the mechanical sum of Christ's 
own words — not merely the collocation of the words 
of the Bible, but the product of the Church. It is 
the interpretation of these words, and of the merely 
external history of Christ by the Spirit, in the degree 
to which he is able to enlighten the Christian com- 
munity." f " The existence of the Church consists in 
its perpetual becoming. This is grounded in the na- 
ture of Spirit to eternally cognize itself, to divide it- 
self in the finite sparks of individual members, and 
then to gather itself out of this finitude and compre- 
hend itself again. Thus the Christian consciousness 
becomes divine self-consciousness in progressively 
adequate forms." % The spirit which is poured out is 
but the incipient impulse to its fuller realization. The 
mediation takes place in the subjective experience of 
individuals in the social community. 

Dogma is inevitable and necessary.' " The real- 

* Philosophy of History, p. 341. 

f Vol. ii, p. 328. % Ibid., p. 330. 



The Absolute Religion. 297 

ized communion of worshipers is what we call in 
general the Church." It is self-sustaining, self-propa- 
gating, self-defining, and authoritative through the 
power and wisdom of the indwelling Spirit. Its 
positing of dogma is an essential activity of the 
Church. It is a thinking as well as a loving and 
practical communion. It thinks the contents of the 
gospel narratives and of the Christian sentiment 
into the form of the Faith. " Dogma is necessary, 
and must be taught as valid truth." It is the work 
of the Holy Spirit in the thinking power of the 
educated Christian consciousness. This doctrine 
must be preserved and taught. This makes the min- 
istry an essential institution of the Church. Mere 
feeling or subjective certitude can form no bond of 
unity. " For the community (of believers) is only 
possible through definite church teaching. Each 
individual has his own feelings, and sentiments, and 
views of the world. This form does not answer for 
spirit which wishes to know how it is contained 
therein." * 

He maintains the Church's doctrine of the sacra- 
ments. The subject is born into this community of 
life and doctrine in baptism. " The Eucharist is the 
central point of the doctrine of Christianity, and the 
highest act of worship. While, on the one hand, the 
constant preservation of the Church (which is at the 
same time the uninterrupted creation of itself) is the 
continued repetition of the life, passion, and resur- 
rection of Christ in the members of the Church, this, 
on the other hand, is expressly accomplished in the 
sacrament of the Lord's Supper."f He maintains the 

* Philosophic der Religion, vol. ii, p. 353. f Ibid., p. 338. 



298 Philosophy of Religion. 

Lutheran view of the Eucharist against the unspirit- 
ual Roman and the non-spiritual Zwinglian recollec- 
tion view, or that of prosy rationalism. " There is no 
transubstantiation, except such a one as annuls the 
external, and makes the presence of God strictly a 
spiritual one, demanding the faith of the communi- 
cant as an essential condition." * 

Throughout this Part, his polemic against the con- 
ception of God as a great Being, dwelling at a dis- 
tance from the world which he has made and re- 
deemed, almost ceases. This gives place to his con- 
structive work of resetting all the doctrines of the 
Church in the light of the immanence of God the 
Holy Spirit. The Trinity, the Divinity of our Lord, 
the atonement, and immortality, are all as explicitly 
taught as by any theologian, and indeed in the very 
spirit and method of the greatest teachers of the early 
Greek theology, as well as of Anselm and Aquinas. 
Especially profound and exhaustive is his explication 
of the doctrines of sin and of the atonement, being 
implicated with the whole scheme of doctrine begin- 
ning with the Trinity, and ending only with the ulti- 
mate form of the kingdom of God. 

Through both dogma and worship the Spirit is 
spreading abroad and realizing the love of Christ in 
the hearts of men, thus extending his kingdom. The 
leaven is leavening the whole lump. " This actuali- 
zation of the spiritual into universal reality contains, 
at the same time, the transformation and the reforma- 
tion of the Church." f It meets and annuls by real- 
izing itself, in the hostile world of (a) the hearts of 
men, (b) the rationalism of the reflective understand- 

* Vol. ii, p. 340. f Ioid -» P* 34°* 



The Absolute Religion, 299 

ing, (c) thought, reconciling all to itself. In the Phi- 
losophy of History (p. 341) he explicates in a slightly 
different form this mediating work of the Holy Spirit 
in " reconciling the world unto himself," thus gradu- 
ally hallowing the secular. 

There is a double attitude toward the world: 1. 
The two are antagonistic. The world is hostile. 2. 
The world supplies the intellectual media for the 
work of the Holy Spirit in interpreting the content 
of the faith and in formulating it into doctrinal sym- 
bols. It also supplies the media for his work of 
organization. Let us take this latter first : (2.) The 
chief element in the formulating of the doctrinal sym- 
bols was supplied by the previous development of 
philosophy. Alexandria had become the meeting 
and mingling point of thought of the East and the 
West. Philosophy had become religious, working 
at the problem of the bridge between man and 
God. How can the Infinite descend to the finite, 
and how can the finite rise to the Infinite? Here 
the doctrine of the Logos had its first rise. Spirit is 
A070?. " Here speculative thinking attained those 
abstract ideas which are likewise the fundamental 
purport of the Christian religion " (p. 342). Both 
the heresies and the developing catholic doctrine 
sprang largely from current philosophical concep- 
tions. The heresies manifested the inadequacy of 
philosophy to the content of Christianity ; and this 
content, on the other hand, forced philosophy to a 
fuller development. Heresy chose now the mono- 
theistic and now the pantheistic element in Chris- 
tianity, and the Church said nay to every such one- 
sided apprehension of its content, and maintained 

its completeness against them all. Prof. Edward 
27 



300 Philosophy of Religion. 

Caird* attributes this work of the Holy Spirit "to 
the healthy instinct of Christendom, that repelled any 
attempt to mutilate its life." 

It was only gradually that it could create out of 
existing philosophical conceptions a philosophy ade- 
quate to its content " In the Nicene Council was 
ultimately established a fixed confession of faith to 
which we still adhere ; this confession had not, in- 
deed, a speculative form, but the profoundly specula- 
tive is most intimately interwoven with the manifes- 
tation of Christ himself. The profoundest thought 
is connected with the personality of Christ — with the 
historical and external. And it is the very grandeur 
of the Christian religion that, with all this profundity, 
it is easy of comprehension in its outward aspect by 
our consciousness, while, at the same time, it sum- 
mons us to penetrate deeper. It is thus adapted to 
every grade of culture, and yet satisfies the highest 
requirements." f 

Now, (i) as to its attitude to the world of organ- 
ized secular life. The Divine reconciliation takes 
place in the hearts of individuals in a community. 
This community becomes " a particular form of secu- 
lar existence, occupying a place side by side with 
other forms of secular existence. The religious life 
of the Church is governed by Christ ; the secular side 
is left to the free choice of the members themselves. 
Into this kingdom of God organization must be intro- 
duced. There is a necessity of a guiding and teach- 
ing body distinct from the spirit-pervaded community. 
Those who are distinguished for talents, character, 
piety, learning, and culture in general, are chosen 

* The Philosophy of Kant, p. 22. f Philosophy of History, p. 344. 



The Absolute Religion. 301 

as overseers (Vorstehern)." * To this intelligent body 
of overseers, the spirit comes in a revealed and ex- 
plicit form, while in the mass of the community it is 
only implicit. This body becomes thus an authority 
in spiritual as well as in the secular affairs of the 
community. This distinction gives rise to an ecclesi- 
astical kingdom in the kingdom of God. But, how- 
ever necessary, this is not ultimate. Concrete free- 
dom is not yet fully realized for the community. As 
yet all are not free, do not recognize the authority as 
congenial and self-imposed. It is yet an external and 
partly arbitrary and so non-rational authority. The 
realization of this real freedom and the rationally 
valid authority of authority is a long process through 
the ecclesiastical tyranny of the middle ages. For, 
besides this authority over the consciences of men, 
we find the Church assuming authority over secular 
interests. 

Soon, too, priestly consecration, though begin- 
ning as the official recognition in specially appoint- 
ed overseers of that authority and divinely impart- 
ed knowledge which was implicitly recognized in 
the universal priesthood of all Christian believers, 
changes its democracy into an aristocracy. This 
formed one of the iron rods for the terrible discipline 
of the middle ages, resulting in the grand denial of 
this tyranny in the Reformation, which, instead of 
breaking or marring the unity and life of the Church, 
only manifested it in higher form, in more essential 
unity with its Divine head. The merely ecclesiasti- 
cal supremacy over the minds and institutions of men 
had served its mission. It had educated the world 

* Philosophy of History, p. 344. 



302 Philosophy of Religion. 

into freedom, of which the Reformation was the 
voice. In the ethical life of the family and state, as 
well as in the Church, the reconciliation of religion 
with the world is accomplished.* Humanity now at- 
tains the consciousness of a real internal harmoniza- 
tion of spirit, and a good conscience in regard to sec- 
ular existence. In this there is no revolt against the 
Divine or sacred, but the realization of that better 
subjectivity which recognizes the Divine in its own 
being ; which is imbued with the true and the good, 
and labors for their attainment in the kingdom of 
God on earth (secular). But this realization is not 
actualized immediately. The Reformation sets free 
subjectivity, which does not universally attain rational 
liberty at once. Abstract liberalism and rationalism 
assert themselves. The French Revolution was the 
manifestation of the former; the Aufklaerung, the 
Ecclaircissement and English Rationalism of the latter. 
The Spirit has further work to do to make the secular 
life the positive and definite embodiment of the spirit- 
ual kingdom, and to reconcile human thinking to it- 
self. Mere rationalism results in agnosticism, and 
pessimism thinks its reflective thought out. But, in 
its expiring moment, the Spirit re-enters to restore to 
fuller life. Spirit itself is thinking that can sympa- 
thize with all the infirmities of human thinking, that 
is in it all, coaxing and forcing it to full concrete 
cognition. Through this work of the Spirit in phi- 
losophy, the content of Christianity is restored, re- 
habilitated, and justified to thought. Religion must, 
for thinking men to-day, ground itself upon a sub- 
stantial and necessary content of truth. Its ration- 

* Philosophic der Religion, vol. ii, p. 344. 



The Absolute Religion. 303 

ality, in the speculative sense of the word, must be 
vindicated. 

This is the work of Philosophy. Abstract think- 
ing of rationalism and no -thinking of pietism de- 
stroy or acknowledge no content, no objective 
truth. Subjective individualism, withdrawing to 
the height of its infinity, reduces all intellectual and 
ethical content to its own creation. Everybody 
has his own God, his own Christ, his own truth, his 
own good ; they are but his own creations. Philoso- 
phy contains their objective reality. Its " objective 
standpoint alone is capable of giving the testimony of 
Spirit in a cultured and thinking manner, and is con- 
tained in the better class of dogmatism of our times. 
This standpoint is, therefore, that of the justifica- 
tion of religion, especially of the Christian and true 
religion. It cognizes the content according to its ne- 
cessity, according to its reason, and, in the same way, 
it cognizes the forms in the development of this con- 
tent. We have inspected these forms, namely : the 
phenomenal manifestation of God, the image -con- 
ception for the sensuous, and the spiritual conscious- 
ness, which has attained universality or thought, the 
complete development of the Spirit." * 

Thinking that has broken into religion, at first 
occupies a questioning and then a hostile attitude to- 
ward the figurate-conception, and then toward the 
doctrinal form of religion. Religion takes refuge in 
emotion, renouncing the understanding of its content. 
But then the holy Church has no longer a bond of 
community and collapses into sects ; or, its teachers 
may say, Do not entertain these questionings, and 

* Vol. ii, p. 351. 



304 Philosophy of Religion. 

then they are solved. But when I begin to think, I am 
compelled to have them ; I can not put them aside ; 
and the necessity of answering them rests upon the 
necessity of having them. " Thinking that has thus 
commenced never ceases ; it persists and makes the 
heart, heaven, and the cognizing spirit empty and 
void. The religious content then takes refuge in 
the idea. Here it must receive its justification, and 
thinking must conceive itself as concrete and free; 
it must hold the differences not as merely positive 
and external, but must let them go freely from itself, 
and thereby recognize the content as objective." * 

Philosophy has for its aim the cognition of truth, 
of God, for he is the absolute truth. Light commu- 
nicates itself. " Whoever says that God can not be 
cognized says that God is envious, and he is not in 
earnest in believing in God, no matter how much he 
talks about him. Rationalism, that vanity of the un- 
derstanding, is the most violent opponent of philoso- 
phy ; it is offended when philosophy points out the 
presence of reason in the Christian religion, when it 
shows that the testimony of the Spirit of truth is the 
revealed religion. In philosophy, which is theology, 
the whole object is to show reason in religion." f 

" In philosophy, religion finds its justification 
from the standpoint of thinking consciousness. Un- 
sophisticated piety has no need of this ; it receives 
truth upon external authority, and finds satisfaction 
and reconciliation by means of this truth. In faith 
there is already the true content, but it still lacks the 
form of valid, necessary thought. This speculative 
thought is the absolute judge before whom the con- 

* Vol. ii, p. 351- f Ibid., p. 353. 



The Absolute Religion. 305 

tent of religion must verify and justify itself." * The 
charge of placing philosophy above religion is false, 
for it has no other content than religion. It only puts 
it in the form of necessary thought to save those who 
are losing it through mere reflective thought or 
rationalism. It thinks through and above this abort- 
ive rationalism. It is Christian philosophy or the- 
ology. It acknowledges that its content is the Chris- 
tian religion. Prof. Morris thus distinguishes be- 
tween reflective and philosophical thought : 

There is, indeed, a so-called " reason," the " supersedure " 
of which is an indispensable condition, not only of spiritual 
salvation, or of the entrance into the heart of true religion, 
but also of the very existence of a truly positive and substan- 
tial philosophy itself. To this truth the whole history and the 
intrinsic nature, both of religion and philosophy, bear direct 
and abundant witness. The "reason" in question is one whose 
whole industry is absorbed in the detection of abstract con- 
tradictions and identities. Its spirit and its weapons are 
only mechanical and dead, not organic and living. It is 
abstract, and not concrete. All its logic is formal, and not 
substantial. It is " metaphysical," dealing with " uncriti- 
cised categories," and not philosophical. Its " dialectic " 
is subjective, artificial, and superficial, not objective, con- 
tentful, and dictated by the essential nature of whatever 
may be the subject of its inquiry. In short, and in fact, it 
is sense-conditioned reason-ing^ and not sense-conditioning 
reason. The Germans distinguish these two under different 
names, calling the former Verstand, or " understanding " — 
as though its characteristic work were best described as 
consisting in arresting, or bringing to a standstill, the living, 
moving process of reality, with a view to the separate, ana- 
lytical examination of its parts, and of the mode of their 

* Vol. ii, p. 353. 



306 Philosophy of Religion. 

mechanical combination. To the pure understanding, rea- 
son proper, and all its objects — all living, organic wholes, 
and all vitally synthetic processes — are a mystery and in- 
credible. What reason, as a faculty, whose seat is at the 
very center of human experience, perceives, is imperceptible 
for the understanding. Reason is the faculty of insight — 
i. e., of essential, thoroughly, and completely objective, or 
experimental intelligence ; understanding is the faculty — if I 
may so express myself — of outsight, or of superficial, empiri- 
cal, contingent information respecting external particulars, 
viewed in abstraction and separation from their essential and 
vital ground. 

To men of the eighteenth century " reason " meant 
" understanding " ; and the self-styled " Age of Reason " 
was, accordingly, not the age of true, concrete, vital reason 
— which, in operation, is simply equivalent to Experience 
taking true and complete and unprejudiced account of herself — 
but rather the age of "reasons" of argument, or alleging 
of " reasons," //-# and con, and of consequent "doubt," re- 
specting all that can be made a subject of argument — as 
everything can. Let us not, then, confound the " reason " 
of Thomas Paine with the reason of Aristotle, or of philoso- 
phy. And, finally, let us not forget that, while any true 
revelation may be expected to transcend and confound the 
" reasonings " of an unvitalized " understanding," the very 
condition of its reception is the existence of reason, as also 
the condition of its effectiveness is that by it reason finds 
itself truly illuminated. 

As matter of fact, philosophy has received illumination 
from the Christian consciousness in regard to three funda- 
mental conceptions, of the Absolute, of Nature, and of Man. 
And let it be remembered that, when I say " philosophy," 
I do not mean any mere jargon of words, nor any arbitrary 
collection of dogmatic opinions, but philosophic science — 
the science, in the strictest sense, of experience, and of ex- 
perience taken in the deepest, most comprehensive, truest, 



The Absolute Religion, 307 

and richest sense of the term. Under the influence of the 
Christian consciousness, then, philosophy has come to a 
more definite and complete conception of the concrete, liv- 
ing unity of the Absolute, as Spirit. It has, secondly, been 
enabled to conceive and comprehend more distinctly the 
personal, living relation of the divine Logos to the world. 
It need hardly be said that, in proportion as this relation is 
distinctly conceived, and its truth perceived, the possibility 
of a lapse into pure naturalism or pantheism is taken away. 
And, thirdly, Christianity has contributed to philosophy a 
fuller sense, and demonstration, of the truth that man is 
made perfect man, not through mere " imitation " of God, 
or " resemblance " to him, but " in one " with him, by an 
organic union which, so far from interfering with his free- 
dom, is the very condition of his true — i. e., his spiritual — 
freedom, and of his true spiritual personality.* 

Moreover, as Hegel affirms, this whole process 
of thought must take place within the Church itself. 
It is to be Christian thinking, subject to the Church, 
even when criticising and doubting its formal doc- 
trines on its way to speculative insight and har- 
mony of them. Hegel distinguishes three stages or 
classes in this work : " The first is that of immediate, 
unquestioning religion and belief; the second, that 
of the understanding, or the rationalism of the so- 
called people of culture ; and, finally, that of philos- 
ophy." f The rationalism of the second class creates 
discord which itself is powerless to heal. Hence 
the inadequacy of the Apologetics of the Under- 
standing, which I have criticised in Chapter IV. 
Only reason can heal the wounds made by reason, 
but it must be the higher reason of philosophy. 
Though discord and skepticism still appear in the 

* Philosophy and Christianity, pp. 313-315. f ^°1- "1 P 354* 



308 Philosophy of Religion. 

actual Church, we dare not speak of its possible 
decadence. The gates of hell can not prevail against 
the Church inspired by the Holy Ghost. The dis- 
cord of semi-pagan life exists in many members of 
the communion. But the discord of thought, of 
skepticism, Hegel says, " has been dissolved for us 
by philosophy, and the aim of these lectures has 
been to reconcile reason with religion, to discern the 
latter in its various forms as necessary, and to find 
again in revealed religion the Truth and the Idea." * 
This song of triumph to philosophy at the end of his 
work, however, is not as naively joyous as the an- 
them of praise to religion with which he begins (first 
page of Chapter III). For he throws in this minor 
chord : " But this reconciliation is only a partial one, 
not having acquired external universality. Philos- 
ophy is, in this respect, a secluded sanctuary, and its 
servants form an isolated priesthood, which can not 
go hand in hand with the world, but must guard the 
treasure of the Truth." f 

* Vol. ii, p. 355. f Ibid., p. 356. 



APPENDIX. 



CHRISTIAN UNITY IN AMERICA AND THE HISTORIC 
EPISCOPATE. 

Ubi Spiritus ibi Ecclesia. 

The American Church is a church of the future, a real- 
izable vision, an ideal certainly more potent to-day than at 
any other time in our history. Its elements appear to be 
mere disjecta membra to some, who can not see the working 
of the synthesizing spirit in the various Christian communi- 
ties of our land. The Roman Catholics say that this Church 
is already in our midst. There are evidences of an effort 
on its part to translate its foreign title Roman into Ameri- 
can. It seems to be an impossible feat. The grip of Rome 
will never be relaxed so as to allow its members here to 
form an autonomous national church. 

Some in our own Protestant Episcopal Church, also, be- 
lieve that the American Church is a present existing organ- 
ism. All that seems necessary is to strike out the obnox- 
ious epithet of Protestant Episcopal, and by this simple de- 
vice we appear in our true light as " The Church in the 
United States of America." 

None of the other large Christian bodies have such a 
short and easy method of realizing this ideal. In fact, they 
have no definitely framed ideal as to the form of this Church 
of the future. They labor and pray for Christian unity. The 
Evangelical Alliance is the exponent of their eirenical effort, 



310 Philosophy of Religion. 

seeking their common faith and spirit. It has no plan of 
union, and no authority to organize. But it certainly pro- 
motes that unity of spirit which must be primal and causal 
in any union of the parts. It thus begins at the heart of 
the question, and so commands the sympathy of those who 
believe that any worthy valid union of organization can 
only come as the natural expression of an ethical unity of 
spirit. 

Certainly this is better than ready-made artificial plans 
of unity, and better than any dogmatic claim that the for- 
mal organism is already in our midst, -and all that is 
needed is that all other bodies should conform to it. But 
it does lack that practical element which is so noticeable a 
feature of the report of the Committee on Christian Unity 
adopted by the House of Bishops and by the House of 
Clerical and Lay Deputies in the General Convention of 
1886. That was the outcome of the loftiest devotion to the 
kingdom of God, as distinguished from merely sectarian 
devotion to their own Church. It is as eirenical as it is 
practical. It was put forth from a yearning for unity to 
meet the like yearning for Christian fellowship visibly mov- 
ing the hearts of so many Christians in our land. It de- 
clares "that this Church does not seek to absorb other 
communions," and " that in all things of human ordering or 
human choice, relating to the modes of worship and disci- 
pline, or to traditional customs, this Church is ready in the 
spirit of love and humility to forego all preferences of her 
own, ... to heal the wounds of the body of Christ." But it 
also declares that Church unity can only be attained by the 
acceptance by all Christian communions of these four essen- 
tials of catholicity : 1. The Holy Scriptures; 2. The Nicene 
Creed, as the sufficient statement of the Christian faith ; 
3. The two sacraments ; and, 4. The " historic Episcopate, 
locally adapted in the methods of its administration to the 
varying needs of the nations and peoples called of God into 
the unity of his Church." 



Appendix. 311 

It furthermore declares " a desire and readiness ... to 
enter into brotherly conference with all or any Christian 
bodies seeking the organic unity of the Church, with a view 
to the earnest study of the conditions under which so price- 
less a blessing might happily be brought to pass." * 

* The declaration of the bishops is so lofty, humble, and earnest that 
it deserves to be widely known. I gladly give the text, omitting the pre- 
amble : 

" We do hereby solemnly declare to all whom it may concern, and es- 
pecially to our fellow-Christians of the different communions in this land, 
who in their several spheres have contended for the religion of Christ, 

" 1. Our earnest desire that the Saviour's prayer 'that we all may be 
one ' may, in its deepest and truest sense, be speedily fulfilled. 

"2. That we believe that all who have been duly baptized with wa- 
ter, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, 
are members of the Holy Catholic Church. 

" 3. That in all things of human ordering, or human choice, relating 
to modes of worship*and discipline, or to traditional customs, this Church 
is ready, in the spirit of love and humility, to forego all preferences of 
her own. 

" 4. That this Church does not seek to absorb other communions, but 
rather, co-operating with them on the basis of a common faith and order, 
to discontinue schism, to heal the wounds of the body of Christ, and to 
promote the charity which is the chief of Christian graces, and the visible 
manifestation of Christ to the world. 

" But, furthermore, we do hereby affirm that the Christian unity now 
so earnestly desired by the memorialists, can be restored only by the re- 
turn of all Christian communions to the principles of unity exemplified 
by the undivided Catholic Church, during the first ages of its existence ; 
which principles we believe to be the substantial deposit of Christian 
faith and order committed by Christ and the apostles to the Church, unto 
the end of the world, and therefore incapable of compromise or surren- 
der by those who have been ordained to be its stewards and trustees for 
the common and equal benefit of all men. As inherent parts of this sa- 
cred deposit, and therefore as essential to the restoration of unity among 
the divided branches of Christendom, we account the following ; to wit : 

" 1. The Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testament as the re- 
vealed word of God. 

"2. The Nicene Creed as the sufficient statement of the Christian 
faith. 

28 



312 Philosophy of Religion, 

We note several characteristics of this noble, lofty, and 
catholic declaration : First, that it has in view almost entirely 
Christians of the Protestant communions of this country. 
Second, that it can afford no ground for the suspicion of its 
being an attempt to open the way for the absorption of other 
communions in that of the Episcopal Church, for final self- 
aggrandizement. Third, that on the first three of its de- 
clared essentials there is already practical agreement, unity 
of faith, affording a basis for some practical steps toward 
organic unity. Fourth, that the fourth term of communion 
stated — the " historic Episcopate" — is the only one that 
they practically declare the other bodies to lack, while their 
Church holds it only as a trust to be imparted whenever 
demanded by fellow-Christians. There is nothing in the 
declaration to lead one to suspect that this is considered as 
a whit more essential than the other three already held by 
the other Christian bodies. But it is evident that this 
" historic Episcopate " will be the chief topic in all " brother- 
ly conferences " oh the subject of Church unity or of inter- 
Church communion. 

Our own chief work, then, should be to set forth "the 
historic Episcopate " as free as possible from the parasitical 
accretions, distortions, the accidental and unessential debris 
that cluster about it. We should set it forth, not in any one 

" 3. The two sacraments — Baptism and the Supper of the Lord — min- 
istered with unfailing use of Christ's words of institution, and of the ele- 
ments ordained by Him. 

" 4. The historic episcopate, locally adapted in the methods of its ad- 
ministration to the varying needs of the nations and people called of God 
into the unity of His Church. 

" Furthermore, deeply grieved by the sad divisions which afflict the 
Christian Church in our own land, we hereby declare our desire and 
readiness, so soon as there shall be any authorized response to this decla- 
ration, to enter into brotherly conference with all or any Christian bodies 
seeking the restoration of the organic unity of the Church, with a view to 
the earnest study of the conditions under which so priceless a blessing 
might happily be brought to pass." 



Appendix. 313 

of its transient historical forms, but as studied and estimated 
in the spirit of the historical method. This would be a com- 
mon method that the leading students of church history 
in all communions could employ. It, however, would un- 
doubtedly demand the giving up of the traditional spirit on 
the one hand, and the dogmatic spirit on the other, where 
these still exist. Now, " the present predominance of this 
historical method" is, as Prof. Sidgwick says (History of 
Ethics, p. 268), largely due to Hegel. It is true that no 
such a problem as confronts us ever came before him. He, 
however, believed strongly in national Churches. 

He considered religion in its essence to be the foundation 
of the state. Indeed, " though the aspects of religion and 
the state are different, they are radically one ; and the laws 
find their highest confirmation in religion " (Philosophy of 
History, p. 468). When religion exists as separate, dissenting 
organizations within the state, they must, he says, be subor- 
dinated to the ethical supervision of the state. They can 
not be allowed to foster anything absolutely " alien or op- 
posed to the constitution," or to treat the State as a soulless, 
Godless mechanism. The ultimate guarantee of the state 
laws is the disposition of its people. Churches have the 
large part of the work of forming this disposition. Hence 
a want of freedom in religion will produce the same lack 
in the state, and a wrong conception of God will lead 
to bad laws and government. Modern states base their 
constitutions on the principle of freedom. Hence, wher- 
ever the Roman Catholic religion becomes the prevail- 
ing form, the free state is endangered. Here two kinds 
of conscience exist, the religious conscience, under the 
direction of its priests, making the other virtually to be 
no conscience. Hence Hegel gave the political pref- 
erence to Protestantism, because it inculcates freedom of 
thought and conscience. The Protestant conscience is the 
ethical (Sittliche) conscience, which harmonizes with the 
principle of free political life (Philosophie der Religion, vol. 



314 Philosophy of Religion. 

ii, p. 246, and Philosophic des Geistes, p. 439). He con- 
sidered the Reformation, as we have seen, to be, in one as- 
pect, the abrogation and the reconciliation of the unethical 
dualism between the Church and the world of ethical (Si'tt- 
liche) institutions of family and state. Religion now 
esteems the secular life as sacred ; affirms the family life 
to be more truly ethical than celibacy, and Christian rulers, 
as well as priests, to be the servants of the Lord. Thus 
Christianity came to build up the great ethical world of 
modern life.* 

We have also noted how thoroughly it is in the historical 
spirit that he studies the origin of the Christian Church and 
ministry. u Jt seemed good to the Holy Ghost and to us " 
(Acts xv, 28) is the one formula concurrent with all the de- 
veloping forms of church life, justifying them; present and 
future generations of Christians were to be guided into the 
truth, and to exert plenary authority, not infallible wisdom, 
in developing its own form of secular life, or external or- 
ganization — that is, an ecclesiastical kingdom (cf. Chapter 
VIII, p. 300). 

There is no radical dualism between " the Holy Ghost " 
and " us " in this work, except when any one phase of de- 
velopment is stereotyped as ultimate. Hooker thus identi- 
fies the vox populi and vox Dei: "The general and per- 

* How entirely did Maurice agree with this view of the relation of 
the Church and the world ! He says : " The world contains the elements 
of which the Church is composed. The Church is, therefore, human 
society in its normal state ; the world that same society irregular and 
abnormal. The world is the Church without God ; the Church is the 
world restored to its relation with God, taken back by him into the state 
for which he created it. Deprive the Church of its center, and you 
make it into a world. If you give it a false center, as the Romanists 
have done, still preserving the sacraments, forms, and creeds, which 
speak of the true center, there necessarily comes out that grotesque 
hybrid which we witness — i. e., a world assuming all the dignity and 
authority of a Church — a Church practicing all the worst fictions of a 
world " (Theological Essays, p. 305). 



Appendix. 3 1 5 

petual voice of man is as the sentence of God himself." 
But this does not make such jure divino church organizations 
unchangeable, they also being of the nature of human adap- 
tations to existing needs (Ecclesiastical Polity, iii, x). 

No historian of repute to-day denies the fact of the 
Episcopate as a power or function of the Church, having, 
in its substantial form, from primitive times, an essentially 
unbroken continuity of development. Its historic validity 
is unquestioned. We accept and put it forth as one of the 
bonds of historic continuity and present community. But 
some such questions as the following will be asked : Is it 
essential to the existence (esse) of a Church ? Or is it essen- 
tial to the well-being (bene esse) of a Church, which was 
Hooker's contention ? If so, what is its essential nature and 
its intrinsic excellence ? Does it unchurch non-Episcopal 
communions by denying that they possess a valid ministry 
and sacraments, as our English Church reformers did not ? 
Can our Church so interpret this " historic Episcopate " in 
the historical method that she can impart this fourth essen- 
tial to non-Episcopal bodies, either without reordination 
of their clergy,* or with hypo-thetical ordination ? Or, 
finally, can she not impart this essential to others, as she 
does to her own clergy, without requiring subscription 
to any doctrinal theory of holy orders, without, I mean, 
fettering it with the sacerdotal theory of the ministry, 
which is contrary to whole current of Protestant Chris- 
tianity ? 

This is neither an arbitrary, sentimental, nor a merely 
politic interpretation, but the only one that is justified by 
the spirit of the historico-philosophical method. The same 
method gives it to us as a trust to hold and yet not with- 

* This interpretation is given by the Rev. Henry Forrester, in his 
Christian Unity and the Historic Episcopate. This is a calm study of 
the discretion with which the Church in various ages has met like emer- 
gencies, by exercising her plenary authority, in dispensing with reordi- 
nation for the sake of Church unity (cf. Gore., pp. 189-196). 



3 1 6 Philosophy of Religion. 






hold. We believe in preserving the historical institution 
of the Church. We accept the Episcopate as the bond 
of formal historic unity. We do not care, we not dare, to 
give it up. But we do dare, and care very much, to give 
up invalid interpretations of it that distort its chartered 
functions, and prevent all " friendly conference " with other 
Christian bodies, on the subject of Church unity. The Rev. 
Dr. McConnell well says of this anti-Protestant and really un- 
Catholic interpretation : " It costs us now the opportunity to 
gain a friendly hearing for the wise and temperate proposals 
of the House of Bishops, in the interests of Christian unity. 
Until this suspicion of sacerdotalism shall be removed, the 
historic Episcopate will go begging " (American Episcopacy, 
p. 36). This interpretation has only false historical justi- 
fication. That is, it can be found to be the prevailing view 
at certain times and with certain parties in the Church. 
But the true historical justification of past forms is only for 
their own concurrent times and circumstances, not for others. 
It vindicates the Papacy in the past, and yet invalidates it 
for the present Church. So, too, it invalidates the sacerdotal 
theory of holy orders that has been attached to the purely 
governmental function of the Episcopate of the Apostolic and 
post- Apostolic Church. 

The Church's organization was evolved, and so was 
divine. It is yet evolving, and may evolve into different 
forms. Nay, it must thus evolve, to retain its vital power and 
divine significance. This principle must be controlling in all 
attempts to give the historic Episcopate to our brethren of 
other communions, on the way to the forming of the national 
Church of America. This alone will save our offer from the 
opprobrium of arrogance. 

The whole result of the historical method in this de- 
partment is opposed to what I have called the unhistorical, 
sacerdotal conception of the origin and function of the 
Episcopate. That fiction of obscurantism, the creation of 
feeling, fancy, and priestcraft, which reads the New Testa- 



Appendix, 317 

ment with sacerdotal glasses, should be relegated to the 
limbo of other man-made, jure divino theories. That of the 
jure divino theory of kings to govern their people well, served 
its mission. But the same theory, perverted to that of the 
right to govern people badly for their own profit ("ZY/W 
desi mot "), has already led the way that its sister must fol- 
low. How often it is true that " the children of this world 
are in their generation wiser than the children of light ! " 
How often the state leads the way, forcing the Church to 
follow the Divine guidance . f 

Martin Luther once wrote to King Henry VIII, "I, 
Martin Luther, by the grace of God an ecclesiastic, to Henry, 
by the ungrace of God, King of England." And yet the 
state, as the organization for the perfection of human life 
in public affairs, is as jure divino as is the Church in its 
sphere. They are both means to the end of man's well- 
being, and as such jure divino, necessary. Any other jure 
divino interpretation of Church polity is both mechanical 
and mythical. 

Hooker's claim for the Episcopate was based strictly 
on the history and well-being of the Church. He was con- 
tending against the Puritan for holding the same jure di- 
vino theory of a New-Testament-given polity that our Anglo- 
Catholics hold to-day. No wonder, then, that this party 
have ceased to refer to Hooker, and that they are doing 
all they can to shelve him, and bring out Laud and Ban- 
croft as the true exponents of Church principles. Indeed, 
it was not until the close of the sixteenth century that 
the jure divino theory of the Episcopate was broached in a 
sermon by Bancroft. Denied by Hooker in the interest of 
a larger view, it was taken up again and pressed 'to its ex- 
treme form by those ecclesiastics who sought to uphold the 
Stuart theory of the divine right of kings, in return for the 
support given by the Stuarts to the divine right of Episco- 
pacy. Till that time no leading divine had made Episco- 
pacy to be the chief essence of the Church, or " unchurched 



3 1 8 Philosophy of Religion. 

the bodies of the Continent for an infelicity, not a fault." 
Hooker never claims Episcopacy as essential to the being of 
the Church, but freely allows that such churches as were, 
by untoward circumstances, organized without the Episco- 
pate, are authorized to have a ministry suited to their needs. 
He rather laments than exagitates their defect of not having 
government by bishops. In his whole treatment of the topic 
he is practically a contemporary of those who use the his- 
torical method to-day. 

The Church of Christ, as an organized body, is clearly 
a secular institution, subject to all the conditions of a de- 
velopment in time and in the world. Its early literature is 
now so well studied that there is little room left for the 
holding omne ignotum pro mirifico. It is, too, being studied 
with reference to the forms of social, civil, and religious 
organizations at the time of its rise, and of those of the 
various stages through which it has since passed. The 
transforming power of the new leaven is seen entering the 
prepared lump. The faith and the life of Christ in his 
disciples and the early converts was the leaven. There was 
no prescript draft of polity given either by Christ or his 
apostles. That it developed according to its wants. The 
form of the family or of a brotherhood was sufficient for 
its primal needs. Only saintly idealists,* and ecclesiastical 
dreamers and pedants and politicians, are capable of the 
vision of the Church dropping ready made from the skies, 

* Principal Gore, in arguing for the Episcopate " as a devolution 
from above and not a delegation from below " — that is, from the apostles 
by localization rather than from the presbyters as an elevation — can not 
find the needed facts. He admits that " there was not, indeed, such a 
localized ruler in every Church in the age immediately after the destruc- 
tion of Jerusalem," and appeals to unfounded tradition, very honestly 
qualifying its worth in this way : " But even if this and similar traditions 
present us with the facts somewhat idealized, as is the habit of tradition, 
at least they do not misrepresent the facts " (The Church and the Minis- 
try, p. 306). 



Appendix. 319 

or of a definite polity imparted by our Lord during the 
great forty days. They, alone, can have the conscience to 
apply all the scriptural terms, applicable only to the ideal, 
the perfected, the wholly holy bride of Christ, to the visible 
historic forms of its secular life ; and they alone care for the 
right to use certain consecrated phrases in anathematizing 
all who attempt to lift the mythical veil from their idol and 
reveal the living power of the Holy Spirit immanent in what 
they choose to stigmatize as secular. 

The historical method says, Given the new and wondrous 
life and spirit of Christ and the contemporary forms of so- 
cial, civil, and religious organizations, and the new needs of 
the Christian communities, and then the presumption of any 
mechanically supernatural origin of the Church's organiza- 
tion is an impertinence. As Dr. McConnell says, " If one 
had been present when God was beginning the establish- 
ment of his new kingdom, all that he could have seen would 
have been ordinary men engaged in ordinary activities — 
moving from place to place, teaching, preaching, organizing, 
experimenting under the conditions of ordinary men." The 
definite forms of the Church and the ministry were the 
natural development of this life, its needs and work. The 
Episcopate, as the governing body, not as the channel of 
priestly grace, was soon one of the most essential, as it has 
been the most continuous, forms of this organization. 

These are the two interpretations of this historic Epis- 
copate : 1. That it is either an essential or a desirable mode 
of church government; and, 2. That it is the necessary 
channel for imparting the grace of a valid ministry and 
sacraments (cf. Gore, pp. 70, 345). 

I. The first is plainly the view of the English reformers 
till the time of Laud. The greatest divines of the seven- 
teenth and eighteenth centuries (as Usher, Stillingfleet, 
Tillotson, Burnet, and Waterland) agreed with Hooker in 
this anti-sacerdotal interpretation. This was the view of 
those who framed the preface to the Ordinal, and of a long 



320 Philosophy of Religion, 






line of eminent divines of the Church of England (as Arch 
bishop Whately and Bishops Thirlwall and Lightfoot) and 
of the Episcopal Church in America. 

Both these views, the unhistorical jure divino sacerdotal, 
and the historical jure divino governmental theories are 
maintained by leading divines in our own Church, which has 
made the offer of the historic Episcopate. The so-called 
Loiv and Broad Churchmen maintain ex animo "the his- 
toric Episcopate, locally adapted in the methods of its ad- 
ministration to the varying needs." They are vindicated 
by both the spirit and the results of the historical method 
of studying the facts. Two of the recent Bampton Lecturers 
(Canon Freemantle and Dr. Edwin Hatch) simply modern- 
ize Hooker and Whately, as Lightfoot did before them. 

" There are some," says Prof. Hatch (The Organization 
of the Early Christian Churches, p. 19), "no doubt, who will 
think that to account for the organization of the Church in 
this way is to detract from the nobility of its birth, or from the 
divinity of its life. There are some who can see divinity in 
the thunder-peal, which they can not see in the serenity of 
a summer noon. But I would ask those who think so to 
look for a moment at that other monument of divine power, 
and manifestation of divine life, which we bear about with 
us at every moment. . . . From antecedent and lower forms 
came into being these human bodies, with their marvelous 
complexity of structure, with their almost boundless capacity 
of various effort, with their almost infinitely far-reaching 
faculty of observation. And so, out of elements, and by 
the action of forces analogous to those which have resulted 
in other institutions of society and other- forms of govern- 
ment, came into being that widest and strongest and most 
enduring of institutions which bears the sacred name of the 
Holy Catholic Church." 

Nothing is gained by showing that this or that element 
is more primitive than another, for the preservation we seek 
is not so much ancient form as historical continuity. It is 






Appendix. 321 

given to each generation to inherit, and also to revise and 
reform, its splendid inheritance ; but it can never bring back 
or copy the past, without losing its own life. " To suppose 
a polity fitted to the youth of our religion," says Dr. Wash- 
burn (Epochs of Church History, p. 22), " to be the abso- 
lute law of all times, is a sectarianism as palpable as to 
insist on immersion. I know that, in saying this, I offend 
many champions of our communion. But I urge no radical- 
ism, I give the sound church principle of all our great re- 
formed divines." 

This historical view of the origin and function of the 
Church and ministry is a more truly jure divino conception 
than the one which accounts for them by a mechanical and 
external, supernatural imposition. 

Churchmen of this type accept con amore the historical 
place and worth of their own communion, as a member of 
that "blessed company of all faithful people." But they 
decline to unchurch* the large evangelical bodies about 
them who are so well known by their fruits in all depart- 
ments of Christian activity, in missionary, educational and 

* Hooker says that the Church "hath not ordinarily allowed any other 
than bishops alone to ordain, but there may be sometimes very just and 
sufficient reason to allow ordination to be made without a bishop." 

And Bishop Andrews says : " Though our government be of Divine 
right, it follows not that a church can not stand without it. He must 
needs be stone-blind that sees not churches standing without it." 

Archbishop Whately maintains (The Kingdom of Christ, pp. 209, 
215) that " it is a plain duty for men so circumstanced (as the Conti- 
nental Reformers were) to obey their heavenly Master, and forsake those 
who have apostatized from him. So far from being rebellious subjects, 
they would be guilty of rebellion if they did not." " These bodies had 
full power to retain or restore, or to originate whatever form of church- 
government they, in their deliberate and cautious judgment might deem 
best for the time and country, and persons they had to deal with. They 
were, therefore, at perfect liberty to appoint bishops, even if they had 
none that had joined them in the Reformation ; or to discontinue the 
appointment, even if they had." 



322 Philosophy of Religion. 

philanthropic work. They will not be guilty of the scarcely 
pardonable sin and intellectual blunder, of calling them sec- 
tarians and schismatics. They decline to deny the validity 
of their orders and sacraments. 

This proper/*^ divino theory is applicable to all normal 
authorities in all states and churches, justifiable revolution 
being always recognized. It justifies the Papacy and Puri- 
tanism for certain times and places, and repudiates them as 
evil for others. It recognizes the right of might in all his- 
torical products or forms of ethical (sittliche) life, so far as 
they have served their day and generation in the advance- 
ment of the well-being of man. As the natural congenial 
product of inner life, all such forms are rational. When 
they cease to be natural and useful, they cease to be rational 
and ethical. To claim finality for any one transient rational 
form is irrational. Finality means sterility. But this is not 
the way of the Spirit in this world. The Spirit was there. 
But now he is here. " The powers that be are ordained of 
God." St. Paul could write this even when Nero was per- 
secuting Christians, and could add, " He is a minister of God 
(®eov diaicavog) to thee for good." The ruling powers or- 
dained in the various churches (Articles XXIII, XXXIV) 
are ministers of God for good. Thus (e. g.) the ministers in 
the Presbyterian Church are ordained of God for good. 
This may be frankly and gladly admitted by those holding 
the historical jure divino theory that all normal ethical insti- 
tutions, and their reformed form, are jure divino. 

Esteeming the value of the continuity and the heritage 
of the past, not lightly to be given up, this school heartily 
believes their form of polity and worship to be by far the 
best fitted to maintain and spread abroad the kingdom of 
Christ. But they are not sacerdotalists nor sacramentarians 
in the mediaeval sense of these terms, though they recognize 
the worth of this form of Christianity in the past, and in 
the -present too, where conditions of the past still exist. 
They deny, as does our Article XXV, holy orders to be a 



Appendix. 323 

sacrament. They affirm the laity to be an important part 
of the universal priesthood of believers, and do not con- 
found the Church with, nor make it a mere appendage to, 
the clergy. While clinging to the heritage of the past, they 
are especially concerned to integrate the true, the good, and 
the beautiful in the present work of the spirit of Christ 
among Christians. Our first and foremost work lies with 
our own flesh and blood — the Protestant communions of our 
country. It is pleasant to be able to quote at least one of 
the other school who favors the same direction of effort. The 
Rev. E. S. Ffoulkes, after his return from Rome, writes thus : 
" We are impatient that the Roman Church refuses to admit 
our orders ; let us now observe that attitude toward Luther- 
ans, Calvinists, and Wesleyans, that we should wish Rome 
hereafter to observe toward us ; let us not be too stiff in our 
requirements ; too captious in our criticisms ; too certain that 
our views are not founded on prejudice, and do not require 
modifying to be consistent with truth. We have a great 
fight to wage, but not with Christians " (a sermon preached 
at All Saints, Lambeth, 1871). 

Churchmen of this school cherish their ministry and wor- 
ship for their intrinsic excellence, and yet emphasize points 
of agreement rather than points of difference with those of 
other communions. They do not propose to surrender 
the historic Episcopate, which is their own contribution to 
the cause of Christian unity. But they do propose to sur- 
render all that prevents it from being Catholic, Protestant, 
and republican. They take a higher, broader, and more 
hopeful view of the Church in America than those can who 
look upon the Reformation as a wicked schism and upon 
Protestantism as a failure. They believe that the breaking 
of this dead unity was the necessary step to spiritual unity 
and life ; that Protestantism is the inherent and essential 
life of Catholicity, coaxing or forcing it on to fuller life and 
richer development. They -believe in a Providence, in a 

philosophy of history, in a law of growth and development, 
29 



324 Philosophy of Religion, 

through Romanism and Protestantism, to a larger and better 
Catholicity. This can not be as simple and definite as more 
primitive forms, for nothing can be that has passed through 
a course of historical development. A few neat antique 
phrases, or a few definite antique forms, will not suffice to 
define and hold the differentiated types of Christianity that 
must enter as elements into the national Church of America. 

Nearly every important schism from external unity has 
either been forced by an untrue Catholicity, or it has sprung 
from an attempt to supply and emphasize essential Chris- 
tian elements that were in danger of being lost or forgotten. 
They have thus been the true work of the Holy Spirit, and 
they are known by their fruits. If Protestantism, with its 
four centuries of most stirring life of Christian thought and 
of ethical and secular blessings, with its churches and so- 
cial order, and educational and philanthropic work, has 
been a failure, no one can point us to any success or to any 
divine guidance of the Spirit. It was the Divine necessity 
for Christian Europe. 

But everything finite is imperfect. The Reformed 
Churches on the Continent were, in God's providence, pre- 
vented from duly recognizing the continuity of Church his- 
tory and the victories for Christ and civilization won by 
the united Church of the West, and so lost the historic 
Episcopate. But that great Church had so apostatized 
from Christ that schism from her was the duty of the 
hour (cf. Whately's Kingdom of Christ, p. 210). In God's 
providence they lost a great good, the historic Episcopate, 
in order to keep the chief good, evangelical Christianity. 
Rome would not recognize the guiding finger of Provi- 
dence pointing, through the modern state theory, to the 
autonomy of national Churches, and so lost the Church of 
England. In God's providence the Church of England was 
able to retain the historic Episcopate, without losing the 
better part of the Reformation. It was given to her to hold 
as the common heritage of Protestantism, in due time. But 






Appendix. 325 

she was not catholic enough to contain within her fold the 
Puritan and the Methodist types of Christianity, and so 
lost these vital parts of her realm. Is she, or rather is the 
Episcopal Church in America, catholic enough to-day to 
make this the due time to impart this heritage to other 
communions, in such a way as to be of appreciable and ap- 
preciated benefit ? Can she offer this essential element of 
the historical Church as the basis upon which a truly national 
Church can be formed, without arrogating that position for 
herself by a mere word-juggling with her honest title ? Can 
she supply this missing link so that it may be a vital bond 
of ethical unity ? Can she so demonstrate its present worth 
as a divinely ordained power, fitted for furthering the well- 
being of the Church of Christ in this land, that the gift will 
be received on its own intrinsic merits, which form its only 
sanction, as an essential note of the Church ? The school 
of which we have been speaking labor and pray and hope 
that she can. But there is some suspicion that the office 
and its work are hopelessly connected with a theology and 
an ecclesiastic tendency which is out of all sympathy with 
the current intellectual, social, and religious life of our 
Protestant Christianity. This is, as Dr. McConnell says 
(American Episcopacy, p. 27) : 

" 1. Because the idea of Episcopacy is so fast entangled 
with other ideas which are not necessary to it ; and, 2. Be- 
cause it is in the popular mind associated with a religious 
movement which is counter to the broad, strong, and true 
current of American Christianity." 

II. The other school of interpretation which we have 
mentioned is responsible for this suspicion, which has cost 
us an appalling price, among other things the good-will 
of Protestantism and the opportunity to gain a friendly 
hearing for the wise and temperate proposals of the House 
of Bishops. In truth, that party does not desire either of 
these. It is self-labeled Catholic. It holds the Episcopate 
in an unhhtorical and sacerdotal spirit. It obscures it by 



326 Philosophy of Religion, 

enveloping it with a certain theory of the apostolical suc- 
cession, making it a necessary channel for the grace of valid 
ministry and sacraments.* Churchmen of that party hold 
it in an unhistorical spirit, because they hold it in a form 
"locally adapted" not to the present living Christianity of 
this country, but to that of the middle ages, as the costume 
of a barbarian child might be "locally adapted" to the 
needs of a full-grown man of this generation and culture. 
It looks upon Protestant Christianity as a failure or a chaos, 
as Carlyle's minnow in his little creek might upon the ocean- 
tides and periodic currents, and has but one short and easy 
recipe for its salvation — " Hear the Church." Too often 
this means only the church in their own person, or parish, 
or party. 

It denies that the protesting, differentiating dialectic of 
the life of a Christian commonwealth is as much the work 
of the Holy Spirit as the conservative and synthetic ele- 
ment. It takes a part for the whole. It stands only for 
the arrested growth of the organization at an earlier period. 
But history is not a mere dead past. It is a living present 
in organic connection with a living past, that only becomes 
dead when locally unadapted. The same fact is held by 
both schools. But it is interpreted by the two with both 

* Their theory or doctrine of apostolical succession is thus stated by 
Froude : " 1. The participation of the body and blood of Christ is es- 
sential to the maintenance of Christian life and hope in each individual. 
2. It is conveyed to individual Christians only by the hands of the 
successors of the apostles and their delegates. The successors of the 
apostles are those who are descended in a direct line from them by 
the imposition of hands ; and the delegates of these are the respective 
presbyters whom each has commissioned " (quoted by Rev. John J. Mc- 
Elhinney, The doctrine of the Church, p. 359). Again (from Tract No. 
LII) : " In the judgment of the Church, the Eucharist, administered with- 
out apostolical commission, may, to pious minds, be a very edifying cere- 
mony ; but it is not that blessed thing which our Saviour graciously meant 
it to be ; it is not ' verily and indeed taking and receiving ' the body and 
blood of him, our Incarnate Lord " (ibid.). 



Appendix. 327 

a different historical and philosophical spirit. The one 
says the old must be transmuted into the new ; the other 
says that the new is bad and the old is good. The latter 
sacrifices the kingdom of God to the Church as an end. 
To be a good churchman is more than to be a good Chris- 
tian. They give it a sanctity above and apart from its 
intrinsic excellence as a means to the welfare of the whole 
estate of Christ's Church militant. So as to the value placed 
upon Church authority and holy orders. It calls " orders " 
a sacrament, though our article (XXV) denies it this grace. 
Without bishops no priest, without priest no sacraments, 
and so no salvation except in some way of irregular, 
unauthorized, uncovenanted Divine mercy. • It travesties 
presbyter into priest, and arrogates to itself the grandest 
title in God's universe "Catholic." Fortunately for formal 
truth, it limits this by calling itself the Catholic party. It 
declines discussion, and deals in emphatic assertion. Its 
devout thanks to the Lord for the unity of the Church are 
drowned by its constant litany and commination service for 
the one mortal sin of schism from a dead past. A few 
local directions given to local churches in the apostolical 
age are magnified into a whole book of Leviticus. St. 
Paul's " cloak " is translated " Eucharistic vestment," and 
his "parchments" "liturgy." Apist is developing into 
papist. Miraculous powers, uninterrupted descent, infal- 
lible authority, fixed dogmas, and ready anathemas — all 
are of Rome, Romish. 

As Archbishop Whately said : " It is curious to observe 
how common it is for any sect or party to assume a title 
indicative of the very excellence in which they are especially 
deficient, or strongly condemnatory of the very errors with 
which they are especially chargeable. The phrase ' catho- 
lic ' is most commonly in the mouths of those who are the 
most limited and exclusive in their views, and who seek 
to shut out the largest number of Christian communities 
from the gospel covenant. ' Schism,' again, is by none 



328 Philosophy of Religion. 

more loudly reprobated than by those who are not only the 
immediate authors of schism, but the advocates of princi- 
ples tending to generate and perpetuate schisms without 
end. And ' Church principles ' — * High Church principles ' 
— are the favorite terms of those who go the farthest in sub- 
verting all these " (The Kingdom of Christ Delineated, p. 
125). There can be no more wicked form of schism than 
that which thus binds the oracles of God where he has not 
himself bound them. And this theory is called that of or- 
ganic unity, while it unfrocks the whole body of non-Episco- 
pally ordained ministers, denying the validity of the orders 
and sacraments of those who have been foremost, under 
God's uncovenanted mercy, in spreading the principles and 
doctrines and spirit of Christ among men. Better call it 
the inorganic unity of petrifaction. Its spirit is really 
Donatistic, not churchly. Its Church history can all be 
put in one small volume, a portable but pitiable commentary 
on the Saviour's promise and power of fulfillment. " His- 
tory is heresy," said a doctor of the Roman communion, 
which puts herself above history, or only takes out her own 
from the great current. To it Christ has been defeated by 
anti-Christ. Certain it is that the great mass of American 
Christians will respond to either Roman or Anglo-Roman 
assertion that " history is heresy " in the words of St. Paul : 
" After the way they call heresy, so worship I the God of 
my fathers " (Acts xxiv, 14). The Romish interpretation 
given to the Church by this party can never be accepted by 
American Christianity. For it ignores all the fine spiritual 
life and thought of the Protestant centuries, the outcome of 
the deepest mental and spiritual struggles and life of any 
age of Christendom. It is reactionary, not progressive — 
hierarchical, not democratic— priestly rather than propheti- 
cal and ethical. It aims at once more subjecting the con- 
sciences of the laity to the direction of priests through the 
confessional, practically making it obligatory for confirma- 
tion and the Holy Communion. It imitates the Roman 



Appendix. 329 

costume and cult and dialect, often out-Romaning the Ro- 
mans. It is a party, rather than a school of thought, bent 
upon propagating and proselytizing. It is instant in season 
and out of season in circulating its little reasons for being a 
churchman of its type. It has its index expurgatorius. With 
impudent assumption it puts the Church's imprimatur upon 
its pseudo-Catholic tracts, manuals, and books of devotion 
and of doctrine. Its peculiar horror is sectarianism, and 
its chief mortal sin is schism. Protestantism is " the man 
of sin." Shame forbids me giving the name of the bishop 
who could write thus : " The question with the Protestant 
is not so much what you affirm, but what do you deny ; and 
the more he denies and the less he affirms, the better Protes- 
tant is he. He is not expected to give much heed to the 
Lord's Prayer or the Ten Commandments, and for the most 
part he- does not disappoint the expectation." It is but a 
sorry eirenicon that this party can attempt with the great 
rich current of American Christianity. If the offer of the 
historic Episcopate in their interpretation of its signifi- 
cance could be accepted, it would only lead to an American 
Church that would need to repent in sackcloth and ashes 
for its spiritual apostacy from Christ, and pray to be speedily 
baptized with the fiery baptism of a Reformation. 

Certainly a polemical protest against the interpretation 
of the historic Episcopate by this very polemical party, is 
essential to our holding it forth as an eirenicon to our breth- 
ren of the great Christian communions of America. This 
protest is necessary, because this party, though small, is 
very noisily aggressive. It is the polemical party in the 
Church, loudly and constantly protestant against the Protes- 
tantism of its own communion. It thus greatly misrepresents 
us to others. For, measured by the number and dogmatism 
of its words, it might well be considered as representing the 
dominant view of our Church. In the interest of internal 
peace the greatest possible latitude has been allowed to this 
party. It has been protected in its youth, but, as it gains 



330 Philosophy of Religion, 

strength, it turns again only to rend those who have protected 
it, and seeks to make its liberty the tyranny of the whole 
Church. It seems necessary and just at this time to thus de- 
scend to the level of its polemical arena, and to answer a fool 
according to his folly. It is more than that. It is the ser- 
pent warmed to life in the bosom of the mother, whom now 
it would gladly wound unto death — that is, sting her back 
to the dead past of sacerdotal medievalism. Church infalli- 
bility, a medieval system of sacramental grace, priestly au- 
thority, the confessional, the mass, and the seven sacra- 
ments — these Anglo - Roman doctrines will not commend 
our offer to others ; nor do we wish they would. In its be- 
ginning, this party sprang from a real revival of religion. It 
had then, and has always had, its devout scholars, saintly 
men, and genuine philanthropists. It has done much for 
our own Church in infusing a reverent devotion into worship, 
and has done a noble work of Christian love among the 
poor. But this does not commend the system. The same 
lofty praise due to many of them is also justly accorded to 
very many of the Jesuits. For its many holy men and their 
self-sacrificing labors of love I have all honor and thankful- 
ness. For much that they have done to adorn " the Bride 
of Christ," for the " gold, silver, and precious stones " they 
have built upon the one foundation, I have due apprecia- 
tion. But for the theory, and for many of its practical as 
well as logical results — for its "wood, hay, and stubble" — 
I have only sorrow and shame. 

This retrogressive party is not a large one. While many 
of its exponents are too devout and holy to put it forth in 
the obnoxious form described, it is yet as a party extremely 
pronounced and polemical in its assertion of the sacerdotal 
character of the ministry. It is a clerical party. It em- 
braces a very few laymen. Neither can it be said that the 
other school of thought is dominant in the Church, just in 
the form described. The conservative High Churchmen, 
perhaps, form the bulk of our communion. These hold to 



Appendix. 331 

episcopacy as essential to the very being of a visible Church, 
without giving it the obnoxious sacerdotal interpretation. 
For the most part, they also hold it in the true historical 
spirit described. 

The attempt by the sacerdotal party to capture this 
large element wholesale bade fair of success but recently. It 
has failed and will fail. For that school stands firmly loyal 
to the historical Reformation of the Church of England. Its 
wider perspective, its larger practical wisdom and sympathy 
with the work of the Spirit in the modern world, will prevent 
its members accepting mediaeval sacerdotalism as essentially 
connected with their view of the Episcopate. It is freedom 
from this that makes them at one with the Evangelical and 
Broad Church schools in their desire " to enter into friendly 
conference with all or any Christian bodies seeking the or- 
ganic unity of the Church." It is the sacerdotal system con- 
nected with the mediaeval theory of the Episcopate as the 
necessary channel of divine grace, instead of the primitive 
and reformation view of it as the best mode of government, 
that forms the line of radical demarkation between parties 
in our Church. Between these two there is as yet no tenable 
middle ground. The former is not, and the latter is, Primi- 
tive, Reformed, Anglican, and American. 

This question of our interpretation of the " historic 
Episcopate" is a most practical spiritual one. It is the 
question of the relation of the Protestant Episcopal Church 
to the other Christian Churches of America. The historic 
fact may be interpreted into an unhistorical and unchristian 
theory ; or it may be so interpreted as to be the form for 
unifying in external organization the large spiritual unity 
already existing between the different churches of this 
country. It may be interpreted so as to lead us to stretch 
out our hands to the &#holy Orthodox Greek Church, that 
scarcely awakes sufficiently from its torpid slumber to recog- 
nize our infantile presence ; or to beckon to Rome — to the 
great, wily, comprehensive, absolute master of this theory — 



332 Philosophy of Religion. 

as Mohammed beckoned to the mountain. Or it may be 
interpreted so broadly, reasonably, practically, and philo- 
sophically in the Spirit of Christ and of the historic method, 
that we shall not stretch out our hands in vain to our 
sister churches of America. No age and no form of eccle- 
siastical institution are perfect or lasting, and yet the Holy 
Spirit is the diversifying and unifying principle of them 
all. Holding fast in the spirit of the historico-philosophical 
and practical method, all that is true in the past in vital 
connection with all that is good in the present, we need 
no arrogant pretension of absorbing all into an Anglican 
Church with its fully developed polity and liturgical wor- 
ship, in order to be the leader of broken American Chris- 
tendom into the higher catholicity of the American Church 
of the future. 

The vision of and the sure confidence in the One Holy 
Catholic Church as realized, or as being realized, through 
historic process under Divine guidance, has come to all 
devout disciples of the One Lord. But, under this guid- 
ance, the practical step to be taken by us to-day is toward 
an autonomous national Church. It is the ecclesiastical 
problem of the country. It is a longing of every Christian 
heart. To no heart is it dearer than to the universally known 
and beloved Bishop of Minnesota, who is very much more 
than " the Apostle to the Indians." No one prays and labors 
more for this than he does. A few of his many earnest 
words on the subject are of worth and weight to all. In 
his centennial sermon, before the General Convention of 
1889, he says : " The saddest of all is that the things which 
separate us are not necessary for salvation. The truths in 
which we agree are part of the Catholic faith. In the words 
of Dr. Doellinger : ' We can say each to the other as bap- 
tized, We are, on either side, brothers and sisters in Christ. 
In the great garden of the Lord let us shake hands over 
these confessional hedges, and let us break them down, so as 
to be able to embrace one another altogether. These hedges 



Appendix. 333 

are doctrinal divisions about which either we or you are in 
error. If you are in the wrong, we do not hold you morally 
culpable ; for your education, surroundings, knowledge, and 
training made the adherence to these doctrines excusable 
and even right. Let us examine, compare, and investigate 
the matter together, and we shall discover the precious 
pearl of peace and unity; and then let us join hands to- 
gether in cultivating and cleansing the garden of the Lord, 
which is overgrown with weeds.' There are blessed signs 
that the Holy Spirit is deepening the spiritual life of widely 
separated brothers. Historical churches are feeling the 
pulsation of a new life from the Incarnate God. All Chris- 
tian folk see that the Holy Spirit has passed over these 
human barriers and set his seal to the labors of separated 
brethren in Christ. The ever-blessed Comforter is quick- 
ening in Christian hearts the divine spirit of charity. Chris- 
tians are learning more and more the theology which centers 
in the person of Jesus Christ. It is this which world-wide 
is creating a holy enthusiasm to stay the flood of intemper- 
ance, impurity and sin at home, and gather lost heathen 
folk into the fold of Christ. In our age every branch of the 
Church can call over the roll of its confessors and martyrs, 
and so link its history to the purest ages of the Church. 
We would not rob them of one sheaf they have gathered into 
the garner of the Lord. We share in every victory and we 
rejoice in every triumph. There is not one of that great 
company who have washed their robes white in the blood 
of the Lamb who is not our kinsman in Christ. Brothers 
in Christ of every name, shall we not pray for the healing of 
the wounds of the body of Christ, that the world may be- 
lieve in him ? " 

In his sermon at the opening of the Lambeth Conference, 
1888, he says: "I reverently believe that the Anglo-Saxon 
Church has been preserved by God's providence (if her 
children will accept this mission) to heal the divisions of 
Christendom, and lead on in his work to be done in the 



334 Philosophy of Religion, 

eventide of the world. . . , Surely we may and ought to be 
the first to hold up the olive-branch of peace over strife and 
say, ' Sirs, ye are brethren.' " 

The elements of this problem are before us in the shape 
of the large organized bodies of Christians in America. 
The principles under which it must find gradual solution 
are : First and always, the spirit of Christ gladly recognizing 
each other as "very members incorporate in the mystical 
body of Christ, which is the blessed company of all the 
faithful." As Dr. Washburn said, "I know no other 
churchmanship than this, which loves Christ first, and be- 
lieves that, if we seek first his kingdom and righteousness, 
all shall be added." And, secondly, only in this spirit, as 
essential to large, valid ecclesiastical organization, the his- 
toric Episcopate, the other three essentials being practically 
common to all communions. It is thus that the interpreta- 
tion of the historic Episcopate is a most important and 
practical one. 

Those who assert that there has always been such a 
visible corporate unity through the undivided Episcopate, 
and that upon connection with this depends the spiritual 
relations of the members of Christ's mystical body — that 
is, those who confound or identify the real, living, invisible 
Church with its visible organization — can not fail to recog- 
nize that much of the Master's work is being done outside 
of this close corporation. But they maintain, as they must 
on the ground of their mechanical theory of unity and its 
concomitant sacerdotalism, that this can only be recognized 
as irregular and defective. It frankly unchurches all non- 
Episcopal communions, and thus estranges instead of win- 
ning them to Christian unity as the necessary step to Church 
unity.* 

* The Rev. Charles Gore, Principal of the Pusey House, in a recent 
work on The Church and the Ministry, gives this view of the Episco- 
pate in a volume which is a model of calm, scholarly, and honest treat- 



Appendix. 335 

On the other hand, those who hold the historic Epis- 
copate as a governing function, to be the best visible mark of 
real continuity of the ideal Church, still in the process of 
making, do not conceive it to be absolutely necessary to the 
being of a church, nor, under such providential circum- 
stances as have visibly accompanied the setting up of the 
important non-Episcopal Churches, as essential to the well- 
being of a church.* 

ment of the evidence. One can speak of such a book with the deepest 
respect. But it is a white raven among its fellows. He states this point 
with great mildness. He says : " Beyond all question they " (the Pres- 
byterians, etc.) "took to themselves these powers of ordination, and con- 
sequently had them not. It is not proved — nay, it is not even perhaps 
probable — that any presbyter had in any age the power to ordain. It 
follows, then, that a ministry not Episcopally received is invalid " (p. 345). 
This is to be taken in connection with his teaching of the sacraments 
as the channels of grace which can only be administered by such Epis- 
copal priests. They do not all, however, deny the validity of lay bap- 
tism, as they euphemistically call it, as the early members did (cf. Tract, 
No. XXXV). 

* Since writing this chapter, an article has appeared in the North 
American Review, by Canon Farrar, entitled Why I am an Episco- 
palian. I give the following extracts, as indicating a similar estimate of 
Episcopacy : 

" Let me begin by saying that, though I am a convinced Episcopalian, 
I hold the question of Church organization to be altogether secondary 
and subordinate, and in no sense essential to morality or salvation. I 
consider Episcopacy to be in most cases the best, the most authorized, 
and, in its rudiments at least, the most ancient form of Church govern- 
ment ; but I do not regard it as one of the necessary notes of a true 
Church, nor do I consider it to be at all indispensable for the esse, or even 
for the bene esse, of any Church. . . . Neither here" (in the Prayer Book) 
" nor in any document of the Church of England is Episcopacy insisted 
on as a thing indispensable. . . . The revival and exaggeration of Romish 
principles in Reformed churches may make these views appear lax to 
some ; yet they are, almost totidem verbis et Uteris, the views of some of 
our most honored divines. It naturally follows that, though Episcopacy 
seems to me to have the Divine sanction, I do not, in any sense, regard 
Episcopacy as a thing of immediate Divine institution or universal obli- 
gation, any more than I regard monarchy. . . . There is but one flock 
30 



336 Philosophy of Religion, 

They hold that to deny a valid ministry and sacraments 
to those who have the same belief in Christ and his sacra- 
ments, and who are foremost in evangelizing the world, 
is to make us sectarian and uncatholic. They hold that 
to unchurch all Christian communions without this note, 
is to weaken both spiritual and ecclesiastical commun- 
ion with fellow-Christians. They recognize that the great 
mass of American Christianity is outside their Church, 
and they recognize it as Christianity. To call these 
bodies sects is as great an intellectual blunder as to call 
them Dissenters. 

Dr. Washburn (Epochs of Church History, p. 237) writes 
thus of these two schools : " The one holds the Protestant 
Reformation to be the true historic step in the progress of 
the Church, and would only preserve the continuity of the 
body with the real life of the past ; the other plants itself 
on a fancied Catholic age before the Papacy, and rejects 
the Reformation as a failure. The one holds the supremacy 
of God's Word, and denies the infallibility of even general 
councils ; the other rests on the decrees of Nice as concur- 
rent authority with Scripture and ultimate authority. The 
one retains the Episcopate as of historic worth ; the other 
rejects the validity of other orders." 

The two schools start from the same historical facts. 
But they represent two fundamentally different methods 
of interpretation, based upon two different conceptions of 
God, man, and the world. We may say that the one is 

(irol/jivTi). There are, and to the end of time there will always be, many- 
folds (av\a[). 

" If we are to choose the form which, apart from exceptional circum- 
stances, is ideally and absolutely the best, I believe that form to be 
Episcopacy. I am an Episcopalian because I believe that the Church 
acted under the guidance of the Spirit of God in early and finally 
adopting the rule of bishops, as a rule that would best promote the ad- 
vancement of the kingdom of Christ, and the integrity of the faith, once 
for all delivered to the saints." 



Appendix. 337 

based upon the conception of the Divine immanence and 
the natural and eternal kinship of the Divine and the human 
manifested and certified to in the incarnation of our Lord. 
The other is based upon the conception of the Divine ab- 
sence, and of only a supernatural and mechanical connection 
of God and man. Further characterization is not needed 
or in place here. 

The following are the chief historical facts for interpre- 
tation : 

1. As to the apostolate. The apostles were sent by- 
Christ; they preached, gained converts, appointing over them 
other teachers, while retaining the oversight of them all. 
They appointed assistants in preaching and in the care of 
the poor. 

2. The Church grew in many different places, and among 
many different people. The need of organization became 
more evident as the apostles died. To continue their work 
in the larger sphere, the church in each city selected and 
appointed a president, styled o htivKomos, in distinction from 
the rest of the Episcopoi. These were already also designated 
by the more general and applicable term presbyters* Both 
Ignatius and Jerome represent the elders (presbyters) as the 
successors of the apostles, over whom the bishop presides, as 
Christ (Ignatius), or as a president elected from their own 
number (Jerome). 

3. The chief question, then, is whether or not the Epis- 
copate was formed out of the apostolate by localization, or 
out of the presbyterate by elevation. Facts may be quoted 
to show that it was in the first way in the church of Jeru- 
salem, and in the other way in the church at Alexandria. 

4. It was not till the sixteenth century that any attempt 
was made to prove from the Scriptures that Episcopacy was 
definitely instituted by Christ. Hooker argued stoutly that 
neither Puritan nor Romanist could find any fixed definite 
form of church polity revealed in the Scriptures (Ecclesi- 
astical Polity, Book III, chap, ii, § 1, and chap, x, § 8). The 



3 $8 - Philosophy of Religion. 

state had led the way into this jure divino theory of polity, 
but was rapidly obeying the monitions of God in history 
and leading the way out of it. 

5. It is impossible for any party to revert to more primi- 
tive forms. Thus modern Episcopacy is very different from 
that of early Christianity, in respect not only to jurisdic- 
tion, but also in respect to official function and daily round 
of duties. 

It is also a fact that by the middle of the second cent- 
ury Episcopal polity was the prevailing form of organiza- 
tion, though the diocesan system was of much later growth. 
On the other hand, all the evidence goes to show that this 
form of polity was based upon, grew up in consequence of, 
and was defended by an appeal to, the needs of the Church. 
And it is impossible to prove that it was a definitely fixed 
polity instituted by Christ himself or by his apostles, and 
so essential to the being of the Church. These latter points 
are the missing links that the ultra High Church party 
needs to complete the facts upon which to base its theory. 
That is, there is no proof (1) of the formal constitution 
of Episcopacy, by either Christ or his apostles, as the 
direct succession of the apostolate as distinct from the 
presbyterate. These points, as well as the following, are 
candidly admitted by Gore (The Church and the Ministry, 
p. 269). (2) Nor is there any evidence of definitely fixed 
duties of the Episcopate in its earlier supposed forms, all 
facts showing that both the office and the duty grew out 
of local needs.* 

1. The ultra High Church interpretation of these facts 
and their missing links has a strong attraction for many of 

* It is, doubtless, in view of these necessary admissions that Gore 
says, in an earlier part of his volume (p. 72), that " it is a matter of very 
great importance — as will appear further on — to exalt the principle of the 
apostolical succession above the question of the exact form of the minis- 
try, in which the principle has expressed itself, even though it be of 
apostolical ordering." That is, it seems, making ana piiori theory of 



Appendix, 339 

the most earnest, wise, and zealous men in our Church. It 
meets the needs of those who want a clear, simple, definite, 
and working theory. It is a theory as logical as mathemat- 
ics is logical, and not as illogical as all life and all history 
are. For history follows the non-logical logic of life rather 
than the formal or Aristotelian logic of the understanding. 
Thus it presents other facts for which that theory has no 
place, and can only recognize as irregular and defective and 
inscrutable. It holds external schism as the most heinous 
of sins, and yet it sees a divided Christendom. It can ac- 
count for this by the wiles of the devil or of sinful man. But 
along with this it is forced to recognize the " fruits of the 
Spirit," the manifest presence and work of the Divine Mas- 
ter, and to grant that sectarians are often saints. Yet it 
is logically compelled to unchurch all non-Episcopal com- 
munities. It has generally the courage of its convictions, 
though it sometimes tries to conceal its denial of the validity 
of their ministry and sacraments by allowing that of their 
baptism. In doing this it does not help meet the concrete 
situation. It does not make for either spiritual or visible 
Christian unity. In fact, however, its arrogant position to- 
day has ceased to inflame or humiliate other Christians, 
because of its patent untruthfulness. Its logical and its as- 
serted "extra ecclesia nulla salus" is a perfectly harmless, 
rusty old weapon. Its ubi Episcopos ibi Ecclesia is not 
catholic enough as a definition of the local or spiritual 
boundaries of the kingdom of Christ. 

2. The other school accepts the same facts, and is ready 
to accept the missing links when discovered. But, begin- 
ning with a different conception of God and man and 
their relations, and with a different conception of the per- 



the ministry to be the interpreter of its historical development. Cf. also 
Gore (p. 343), where his reasoning necessarily justifies the Papacy as of 
Divine institution, as that was the logical and historical culmination of 
the one undivided Episcopate theory. 



Philosophy of Religion. 

son, work, method, and spirit of Christ, they give them a 
very different interpretation, as already shown. They deem 
it incongruous with the method and spirit of the Divine 
Master when on earth, that he should have given such a 
definite binding organization to his Church as the other 
theory claims, or that he should have fixed upon a me- 
chanical method of imparting his spirit and life to future 
generations so utterly unlike the method and spirit he 
used in his own day and generation. They find the 
apostolate and the mission of the seventy perfectly con- 
genial with his own manifested spirit and method, as 
also was the appointment of deacons, presbyters, and bish- 
ops by the growing community. Church organization is 
all the movement and growth of highly concentrated life, 
creating its own body out of, or in analogy with, other 
institutions. 

They study Church history as in organic relation with 
secular history, and thus trace the inner and the outer life 
of the Church through the apostolic age, the vast mission- 
ary age, the growth of the Papacy, the Renaissance, and the 
Reformation, recognizing throughout the work of the same 
Spirit dividing severally to each as he will, and as each is 
able and willing to receive. They adopt the eirenical maxim, 
ubi Spiritus ibi Ecclesia. In the interest of truth, as inter- 
preted by the method and spirit of Christ, as well as by the 
spirit of the modern historical method, they decline to un- 
church the other churches of America. In the interest of 
truth, and of a more comprehensive organization of the 
various branches of the Church, and consequently more 
extended usefulness, they also hold out " the historic Epis- 
copate locally adapted in the methods of its administration 
to the varying needs," as making for peace, unity, and the 
best interests of Christ's kingdom. 

Recognizing the working value of the other theory as a 
needed schoolmaster, where the middle ages still prevail, 
they also recognize the exceeding practical value of the 



Appendix. 341 

recovery and restatement of the Gospel after the Law. 
They believe that the sole object for which the Church 
exists is as a means to impart the Divine life to men, and 
that its visible form should be a catholic embodiment of all 
Christian life. And their interpretation of "the facts" 
affords a large, generous, comforting, hopeful, and, we be- 
lieve, Christly view of the Christian Church. They love 
their own Church, but they frankly say, We are not, and in 
exclusive form we can not be, the Church of America. Nor, 
it is only just to add, do any of the riper minds in any party 
seek to absorb the other communions. 

The Puritans and Presbyterians and Lutherans and 
Baptists and Methodists and Moravians have had far too 
large a share in the upbuilding of Christ's kingdom here 
for us to ignore. The Presbyterians in Pennsylvania, for 
instance, like the Puritans of New England, planted the 
religious academies and colleges that shaped the mental and 
moral character of the largest part of that State. It can 
not be amiss, for one who knows from experience the deep 
religious and moral life of that communion, to render grate- 
ful homage for its part in the upbuilding of Christ's king- 
dom in this land. The progress of Christianity in our 
country has been the progress of society as organized by 
vital Christianity. In this progress the influence of these 
great bodies has gone along with the whole spirit of the 
nation, permeating and deepening its Protestant religious 
life. The future Church of America must be the synthe- 
sized outcome of all these religious factors. It must grow, 
develope through formative influences and epochs just as 
the great Roman Church of feudal and monarchical Eu- 
rope did. It must be bound up with the whole social, 
religious, and national life of the people. No one present 
form of the Church in America can absorb into itself all the 
religious life of the country. There is nothing strange, 
unhistorical, or undivine in all this formative process. But 
nothing can be more clear than that, not till we are in our 



342 Philosophy of Religion. 

decadence, can a hierarchy of any type dominate this land. 
Our knowledge of the past, in the historic spirit, is our 
only prophecy of the future. The unity of a nation, and 
the divine guidance in human history, may be our polar 
star as we sail across the broad ocean of history. It may 
lead us to act well our part in this formative process to 
an organic unity, which shall manifest and contain the 
transmuted diversities of administrations and gifts which 
that one and self-same Spirit worketh, dividing to each 
one severally as he will. It is the one body of many 
members, for by one Spirit we are all baptized into one 
body. For the body is not one member, but many. But 
the manifestation of the Spirit is given to every one to profit 
withal (i Cor., xii). 

Our gift is our constitutional order, modeled after that 
of the republic ; our " historic Episcopate," as the bond of 
unity and continuity with the past ; our admirable and en- 
richable liturgy of common worship, ethical tone, and gen- 
uine devotion ; our oecumenical symbols, for transmitting and 
not for strangling the witness of the Spirit ; our practical 
system of organized life ; our professed " happy mean be- 
tween too much stiffness in refusing and too much easiness 
in admitting variation in things once advisedly established"; 
our "general aim, to do that which may most tend to 
the preservation of peace and unity in the Church; the 
procuring of reverence and exciting of piety and devotion 
in the worship of God " ; and to make nothing binding 
"which a godly man may not with a good conscience use, 
or which is not fairly defensible, if allowed such just and 
favorable construction as in common equity ought to be 
allowed to all human writings " (Preface to the Book of 
Common Prayer). This gift is given to us " to profit withal." 
Not to renounce but to exercise our gift is the call of the 
Spirit to us to-day. Not to give up any positive landmarks 
of faith or order for any vague, fanciful, unreal, inorganic 
unity, but to manifest the intrinsic value of them to the 



Appendix. 343 

spiritual life of the whole, and that not as our own private 
property, but as the common heritage of all Christians ; not 
to love others less because we love ourselves more ; but 
while coveting the best gifts, to heed the voice of the Spirit 
whispering unto us the "more excellent way " of charity, 
which never faileth, but shall abide when all other gifts 
vanish away. '* Every good and every perfect gift is from 
above." By their fruits we may know that the other Chris- 
tian churches grow out of the organic life of the one body ; 
that the branches which bear such fruit can only do so by 
abiding in the Vine. " Charity envieth not ; charity vaunteth 
not itself, is not puffed up." We need not wish for external 
utiton until we have the organic, ethical, spiritual unity of 
charity. No mere side-by-side addition, no mere swallow- 
ing of part by part, no artificial or hierarchical absolutism, 
no primitive, mediaeval, or reformation type of the ever-grow- 
ing historic Episcopate, can afford that plan of unity which 
the Spirit himself is forming in and through them all. 
There can be no ethical external union until there is spirit- 
ual unity. There is, I rejoice to believe, more of this unity 
now than our idols of the cloister allow us to perceive. 
Without this ethical unity of the Spirit, any external cor- 
porate union would be but the dark walls of a prison-house, 
or the paper polity of priests. With it there will come that 
integration of the expressed " variations of Protestantism," 
and of the suppressed variations of Romanism, that may 
justly be called the Catholic Church of America. 

In the way of practical suggestions * I have not much 
to add to the one made throughout this chapter. Cer- 

* Since writing this chapter I have read with great pleasure Rev. Dr. 
W. W. Newton's admirable study of the spirit, parties, and drift of our 
Church, entitled The Vine out of Egypt. Candor and charity are its 
marked characteristics. It is written in the interest of Christian unity, 
and gives many valuable suggestions as to practical steps toward this 
result, the author having been actively identified with the work of The 
American Congress of Churches. 



344 Philosophy of Religion, 

tainly I have no paper polity, no doctrinaire scheme, no 
definite vision of this still distant city of God on earth. No 
one formula is sufficient to define it. But certainly the non- 
sacerdotal interpretation of the historic Episcopate is a 
practical step toward it. And this, too, is the very letter 
and spirit of the offer made by our House of Bishops. If 
the great true voice of our Church will speak out and sus- 
tain them, we may hope for many fruitful " brotherly con- 
ferences." If the continuous and vehement protestations 
of the sacerdotal party be allowed to represent the true in- 
wardness of their offer, then we can not. 

I have also mentioned with approval the plan * of giving 
the other communions the Episcopate without requiring re- 
ordination of their present clergy, under the condition of 
the future use of this historical method of ordination. The 
historical precedents for such action have been well stated 
in the small volume by the Rev.' Henry Forrester. 

It may seem " good to the Holy Ghost and to us " to ex- 
ercise again this wise discretion to meet a present emergency, 
looking toward a nearer organic unity. We can not, however, 
suppose that these large bodies would at once dissolve under 
the Episcopal alembic so as to create an immediate fusion of 
all into one ; that would have to come through the further 

* The re-establishment of Episcopacy in Ireland, under the Duke of 
Ormond and his coadjutor, Archbishop Bramhall, is an example of the 
efficiency of the method of conditional or hypothetical ordination of the 
Presbyterian clergy (cf. Carwithen's History of the Church of England, 
vol. ii, p. 342). A similar scheme was proposed at the Revolution by 
Tillotson, Stillingfleet, and others, and again by Rev. Dr. White (after- 
ward bishop) after our own Revolution. The scheme was to form a 
Church here, ordain clergy, and do all the work of a church, hoping to 
obtain the Episcopacy later. If that should be obtained, " any supposed 
imperfections of the intermediate ordinations might, if it were judged 
proper, be supplied, without acknowledging their nullity, by a conditional 
form of ordination resembling that of conditional baptism in the Liturgy " 
( Wilberforce, History of the American Church, chap, vi, and McElhin- 
ney's Doctrine of the Church, p. 346). 



Appendix, 345 

work of the Spirit in historic process. It would be matter for 
further most serious consideration and wise prudence, as the 
handmaid of love. Closer affiliation and co-operation would 
have to ripen gradually into more vital relations. Learned 
and wise laymen should have a large part to do in shaping 
the form of the coming national Church. Laymen skilled 
in the history and science of politics, as well as in the prac- 
tical politics of our republic, would have to be the inter- 
preters of its essential needs in the way of organization. 

The clergy were the Church in pre-Reformation times. 
The laity were not recognized as a part of the universal 
priesthood of Christians, and had no voice in the shaping 
of her organization. But our laity are wiser now, and are 
fortunately claiming their just voice in this work of the 
Church. This, indeed, is almost our spes ecclesicz to-day. 

We possess this fourth essential of a larger organic unity. 
We do so only as a trustee. Our opportunity is our duty. 
It is also our duty to help make our opportunity, and to 
make all possible sacrifices for it. We have made a noble 
beginning in the declaration of our House of Bishops. 
Will the love of Christ constrain us to make that more than 
an empty, formal letter? The reception of other clergy, 
say of the Presbyterians, into our ministry without reordina- 
tion, as we receive Roman Catholic clergymen, might be 
made one step of this process. The plan proposed by the 
Rev. Dr. Shields, in his notable and noble article (The Cent- 
ury Magazine, December, 1887) seems feasible and lawful 
and expedient in regard to the mutual recognition of their 
present orders. " Let both parties," he says, " openly and 
generously recognize each other in coricurrent ordinations, 
as occasion requires. By such means all question of valid 
ministrations would at length die out, as in a marriage of 
rival houses. . . . He would be a bold prophet who would 
strike out either Presbytery or Episcopacy from the future 
Christian civilization of this continent. . . . I venture to 
hope that in any union to be devised, the historic Episco- 



346 Philosophy of Religion, 

pate can be retained. . . . The four terms proposed (by 
the bishops) are so large and fair that they will almost 
carry consent in their statement," Certainly we must at 
least recognize the spiritual efficiency of their ministry and 
sacraments, though we hold to the organic validity of our 
own, with reference to the total organization of ecclesiastical 
unity. But, if we wish to restrict the application of this 
term valid to our method of ordination, we certainly thus 
take out the stinging injustice it has when restricted for 
sacerdotal reasons. We can hold it in the same firm and 
evangelical spirit that the Moravians do. 

If "nations redeem each other," mutually supplying 
mutual deficiencies, we must believe that Churches also 
may thus redeem each other. That this may be recognized, 
is a chief ground of our hope of unity. To this end the 
bishops declare " that in all things of human ordering or 
choice, relating to the modes of worship and discipline, or 
to traditional customs, this Church is ready in the spirit of 
love and humility to forego all preferences of her own." 
If this means anything, it means that all of us, all schools 
in the Church, have personal sacrifices to make of feelings 
and tastes that are so strong as to seem to be almost prin- 
ciples too sacred to be given up. Many things relating to 
modes of worship, and many traditional customs, might be 
mentioned, the giving up of which in love and humility 
would help break down the hedges and heal the breaches 
of our Christianity. 

The best means for discovering just what these special 
obstacles are, is for each clergyman to adopt the message of 
the bishops, and like them manifest his " desire and readi- 
ness to enter into brotherly conference with all " — say with 
all the clergy of the other communions in his own commu- 
nity,* with a view to the earnest study of the unessential 

* Canon Freemantle, writing to the Christian Commonwealth, a dis- 
senting paper, says that a proposal in that journal, that Christians of all 



Appendix. 347 

elements of division. This willingness to understand one 
another's difficulties and predilections, to make reasonable 
concessions, and finally to appreciate and emphasize points 
of agreement rather than points of difference with our sepa- 
rated brethren, seems the best practical step just now to 
help on God's work of drawing the members of his blessed 
Son into vital unity. It is needless to say that this will 
often require the most Christly self-denial, the bravely step- 
ping out of the grooves of congenial methods to make a 
voyage of discovery. But we shall be largely repaid by 
finding ourselves somewhat at home everywhere, because 
we shall find so much of the essential undivided Christ 
everywhere. The spirit of admiration and love will come 
to take the place of ungenerous criticism and misunder- 
standing. This spiritual schism being largely healed, the 
corresponding change will come over the external divisions. 
In the midst of our nation's bitterest, bloodiest sectional 
strife, President Lincoln uttered words that we of the 
Church may well adapt and adopt in this work : " With 
malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in 

kinds should meet together in order to discuss the mode of action to be 
adopted with a view to practical good and to renewing society through 
the Spirit of Christ, was one which had his warmest sympathy : 

" The difficulties in the way lie almost wholly with the Episcopalian 
clergy. There are among them many who long for Christian unity. 
But some are afraid that their ministry might suffer if they met on equal 
terms with other ministers ; some are haunted by what Church authorities 
and Church newspapers might say ; some imagine that, by avoiding the 
questions on which Christian bodies have separated from each other, all 
discussion would become insipid. ' The only result,' said one of the most 
distinguished to me, ' would be that we should separate with the mutual 
assurance that we are all very good fellows.' Such fears are almost 
wholly chimerical. A single bishop who would boldly put himself at 
the head of such a congress as you propose, though he might run some 
risks in this enterprise of faith, would, I am convinced, carry all before 
him. Such risks ought to be undertaken if, as I am persuaded, the words 
of the Episcopal Encyclical at Lambeth in 1888 were sincere and meant 
to be effective." 
31 



348 Philosophy of Religion. 

the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on 
to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's 
(Church's) wound ; ... to do all which may achieve a 
just and a lasting peace among ourselves and with all na- 
tions." 

May this Christly spirit of love constrain us to sympa- 
thetic co-operation with our Bishops toward the realization 
of our common Saviour's prayer to his Father, "that they 
mav all be one, . . . even as we are one." 



THE END. 



STUDIES IN HEGEL'S 
PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION, 

WITH AN APPENDIX ON 
CHRISTIAN UNITY. 



By J. MACBRIDE STERRETT, D. D., 

Frofessor of Ethics and Apologetics in the Seabury Divinity School. 



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II. Introductory. 

III. Hegel's Introduction to his Philosophy of Religion. 

IV. The Vital Idea of Religion. 

V. Theology, Anthropology, and Pantheism. 
VI. The Method of Comparative Religion. 
VII. Classification of the Positive (pre-Christian) Re- 
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VIII. The Absolute Religion. 
Appendix. Christian Unity in America and the Historic Epis- 
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and morals.' The language is admirably lucid and clear, and the meaning of the 
writer is never buried under profound and technical phraseology, too often used 
in such works. Clergymen wjll find it excellently fitted for teaching to thought- 
ful working-men in their parishes."— English Churcnman and Clerical Journal 
(London). 

BIBLE TEACHINGS IN NATURE. By the Rev. Hugh Mac- 
Mill an. 12mo. Cloth, $1.50. 

" These are truly original and delightful discourses in which investigations 
of natural science are skillfully and often eloquently eraploved to establish divine 
revelation and to illustrate its truths."— New York Observer. 



New York : D. APPLETON & CO., 1, 3, & 5 Bond Street 



D. APPLETON & CO.'S PUBLICATIONS. 

STUDIES IN THE CREATIVE WEEK. By Rev. George D. 
Boardman, D. D. 12mo. Cloth, $1.25. 

" These Lectures will tend to broaden the minds of believers, and to lift them 
above the letter to the plane of the spirit. They will show that truth and religion 
are capable of being defended without violence, without denunciation, without 
misrepresentation, without the impugning of motives."— National Baptist. 

STUDIES IN THE MODEL PRAYER. By Rev. George D. 
Boardman, D. D. 12mo. Cloth, $1.25. 

" The book is an exhaustive treatise upon its fruitful theme ; few will gainsay 
the author's profound study of his subject or question the sincerity of his views. 
The chapter on temptation is one of the most original and striking interpreta- 
tions of this line of the prayer that has been presented. The book is one that 
will have more than a passing interest."— New York Herald. 

EPIPHANIES OF THE RISEN LORD. By Rev. George D. 
Boardman, D. D. 12rno. Cloth, $1.25. 

" The author has brought to the study of the epiphanies that profound knowl- 
edge of the sacred writings and clear and felicitous style that make his works so 
popular. The first and second chapters relate to the entombment and the resur- 
rection. Then the epiphanies are discussed in their order: 1. To Mary Magda- 
lene; 2. To the other Women ; 3. To the Two; 4. To the Ten ; 5. To Thomas ; 
6. The Epiphany in the Galilean Mountains ; 7. To the Seven ; 8. The Ascension ; 
9. The Forty Days ; 10. To Saul of Tarsus. It is a book to be profitably read.' 4 
—Baltimore Gazette. 

STUDIES IN THE MOUNTAIN INSTRUCTION. By Rev. 

George D. Boardman, D. D. 12mo. Cloth, $1.25. 

" Replete with the Christian spirit, and the genius and learning for which the 
speaker is noted."— The Christian Union. 

FIFTEEN SERMONS. By William Rollinson Whittingham, 

Fourth Bishop of Maryland. 12mo. Cloth, $1.50. 

"The late Bishop of Maryland destroyed many of his sermons before his 
death. It was very difficult to make a selection from those remaining, but, at the 
urgent, repeated request of his friends, twelve have been chosen, and three al- 
ready published, but now out of print, added by special desire, to form a single 
volume."— Eztractfrom Preface. 

SERMONS PREACHED ON VARIOUS OCCASIONS. By 

James De Koven, late Warden of Racine College. With an Intro- 
duction by the Rev. Morgan Dix, S. T. D., Rector of Trinity Parish, 
New York. With Portrait. 12mo. Cloth, $1.50. 



New York : D. APPLETON & CO., 1, 3, & 5 Bond Street. 



D. APPLETON & CO.'S PUBLICATIONS. 



STUDIES IN THE LIFE OF CHRIST. By the Rev. A. M. 
Fairbairn, D. D., Principal of Airedale College, Bradford, and au- 
thor of " Studies in the Philosophy of Religion and History." 12mo. 
Cloth, $1.50. 

" Professor Fairbairn' s thoughtful and brilliant sketches. Dr. Fair- 
bairn's is not the base rhetoric often employed to hide want of thought 
or poverty of thought, but the noble rhetoric which is alive with thought 
and imagination to its utmost and finest extremities." — Rev. Samuel Cox, 
in the Expositor. 

THE PROPHETS OF ISRAEL, AND THEIR PLACE IN 
HISTORY, TO THE CLOSE OF THE EIGHTH CENTURY 
B. C. By W. Robertson Smith, M. A., LL. D., author of " The Old 
Testament in the Jewish Church." 12mo. Cloth, $1.75. 

" Mr. Robertson Smith is not only a ' full man,' but has a singular 
gift of making a hard subject intelligible. ... He loves to blow away 
the mists of controversy and show the truth in all its attractive simplici- 
ty." — The Academy. 

THE OLD TESTAMENT IN THE JEWISH CHURCH. 

Twelve Lectures on Biblical Criticism, with Notes. By W. Robert- 
son Smith, M. A, recently Professor of Hebrew and Exegesis of the 
Old Testament, Free Church College, Aberdeen. 12mo. Cloth, 
$1.75. 

" Speaking after mature deliberation, we pronounce Professor Robert- 
son Smith's book on Biblical Science one of the most important works 
that has appeared in our time. It justifies, in a convincing and conclu- 
sive manner, what we have from first to last maintained regarding him — 
namely, that he was engaged in an enterprise auspicious to the Christian 
Church ; that he was not assailing the faith, but fortifying it. He has 
not abandoned one jot or one tittle of his principles, but he now for the 
first time states them comprehensively, and points out their natural and 
logical applications." — Christian World, London. 

SCOTCH SERMONS, 1880. By Principal Caird and Others. 
12mo. Cloth, $1.25. 

" It reveals a great change in the theological sentiments of a large 
and influential section of Calvinistic and Presbyterian Scotland — a wide 
and most pronounced departure from the opinions of their forefathers. 
Aside altogether from the opinions which it advocates, it is a volume of 
great ability. With scarcely an exception the sermons are models of 
pulpit eloquence. The thought is vigorous and fresh, and the language 
is clear, natural, direct, and forceful." — New York Herald. 



New York : D. APPLETON & CO., 1, 3, & 5 Bond Street. 

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